Plus, she's using a theory of legal damages to establish actual theft. There's a huge difference between me stealing your actual car and a legislature saying that you would have had a car but for my legal transgression, which was not stealing an actual car.

The former is a factual matter, the later only needs to be supported by a legal policy with a "rational basis," which is hardly a real constitutional legal standard at all and doesn't necessarily reflect anything but the declarations of the regime in power.