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Comment by cbsmith | Hacker News Reader

"Asset forfeiture is lucrative for the DEA. According to their latest notification of seized goods, updated Monday, agents have seized well over $38 million dollars' worth of cash and goods from people in the first few months of this year."

Umm... $38 million in three months works out to about 5% of the DEA's operating budget. If your revenue is 5% of your burn rate, that's not exactly lucrative.

This is money that, absent some form of corruption, benefits exactly no one, not even greedy shareholders or executives with tons of stock options. Let's be careful with our use of "lucrative".

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The DEA isn't a company. They already get a budget from the treasury and shouldn't be behaving like a profit-making concern. "Lucrative" is the right word.

> The DEA isn't a company.

That's exactly my point. Not being a company, the notion of what is "lucrative" for the DEA is quite different.

When is it ever not nice to have $38m kicking around that isn't pre-allocated and can be used for whatever?

Unlike with local seizures, it can't be used for whatever.

Source? I don't doubt you, but I'd like to read up on it anyway as I'm having trouble finding the pertinent information with Google.

Yeah, I don't have one that is explicit. All I know is that many of the rules around the use of civil forfeiture funds for local law enforcement are considered unusual because of the complete lack of regulation and oversight as to how that money can be spent (in a lot of towns, aside from fear of being run of of town, there really isn't much stopping the local sheriff from spending the money on hookers and blow). On the Federal spending side, military intelligence spending is kind of the elephant in the room for "light regulation & oversight" of spending, and even that has more checks and balances than local civil forfeiture.

>Let's be careful with our use of "lucrative".

Any business model that generates $38M/3 months ($152M/yr) could truthfully and emphatically be described as "lucrative." I don't think that's a fair argument.

> Any business model that generates $38M/3 months ($152M/yr) could truthfully and emphatically be described as "lucrative."

No, a business model that generates and $38M of profits in 3 months would likely be described as "lucrative". A business model that generates $38M of revenue with a cost of revenue that is more than an order of magnitude larger is anything but "lucrative".

> This is money that, absent some form of corruption, benefits exactly no one,

What does this even mean? Money gets spend by humans on things that humans want. How can you say it benefits exactly no one? Clearly it benefits the humans who stole it.

> Money gets spend by humans on things that humans want.

Sometimes it gets spent on things that humans don't want.

> How can you say it benefits exactly no one?

I meant no one at the DEA.

> Clearly it benefits the humans who stole it.

Umm... it isn't stolen, and no, it doesn't "clearly" benefit the people who executed the seizure. I doubt those guys see any upside other than perhaps keeping their jobs.

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