This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 17th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One fact about inflation that's not well appreciated is that it also inflates

government snooping into some of your private affairs.

How? In the case of the Bank Secrecy Act, Cato's Nick Anthony explains how decade old provisions

are subjecting more and more of our transactions to suspicionless to say nothing of warrantless federal

surveillance.

What is the Bank Secrecy Act?

The Bank Secrecy Act was a law put in place in 1970 where banks and other financial institutions were essentially required to record and report on financial activity of pretty much all Americans and originally was put in place to try to combat money laundering and moving money to foreign accounts, but today it's

become something very different. Okay, so $10,000 in the 1970s, our colleague Jennifer Schulp has pointed out you could buy two brand new

corvettes for that amount of money and $10,000 doesn't quite go that far anymore.

Yeah, it was arguably a high amount of money at the time.

We even had Supreme Court justices review the Bank Secrecy Act and argue that because it was $10,000, it was

sufficiently high so that it wasn't an undue burden. But if we think about it today,

that's not nearly the same amount of money.

You cannot buy a brand new car for $10,000, just about in any case under the sun and yet it's been unchanged all this time.

We have had two large periods of inflation

the 1970s, including the one we're in right now,

which is of course a 40-year high level of inflation.

That threshold of $10,000 has not changed with the inflation.

Exactly, and it doesn't even matter if it's high inflation or low inflation, any inflation increases this amount.

So what was $10,000 back in the 70s should really be closer to $75,000 today.

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