This is actually a pretty simple debate in terms of what it takes to present the question, which only amounts to: should fines be proportional to income?
It seems to me that they should be. A twenty dollar parking ticket is no impediment to a millionaire, but could represent a dent in a poorer person’s wallet. I’ve thought about this before, but the recent proposals about the FCC raising the fines for indecent broadcast elements brings it up again. If fines are supposed to be a deterrent, why are they not engineered in such a way as to be equally deterrent?
Well, to give you a sence of perspective, according to this article Helsinki follows exactly what you just sujested with rather drastic results:
One of the problems with your proposed model is that the fine needs to be proportional to the crime, so to say someone was charged $1million for jaywalking just sounds stupid.
The other problem is that when the fine is too high, people have no choice but to fight it in court which ends up costing the government a fortune.
Since fines are (at least typically) punishments and not restitution, then if you think about it logically, a $1,000,000 fine to a multi-billionaire actually would be proportional to the crime of jaywalking.
I sure wish it would be possible to make all fines directly proportional to income, but unfortunately lawyers fees are not proportional to income so the multi-billionaire would just tell his legal team “fix this” when he got the ticket, and the punishment (or lack thereof) would still be discriminatory against the poor.
It depends on what you want to achieve. If what you want to achieve is the reduction of a certain type of behaviour to a desired level, a fixed dollar amount is the way to do it at least cost to society (ignoring payment enforcement issues).
This is the knee jerk response of economists: the idea is to put a “price” on behaviour which imposes costs on others. There is no need - and it is not desireable - for everyone to reduce the undesireable activity by the same amount. In the case of pollution, we would surely not want all polluting activities to be deterred by the same proportion - we would want those industries where it’s easy to reduce pollution to reduce pollution (and avoid the emission charge) and we would want those industries where it is very costly to reduce pollution to keep polluting and pay the emission charge. The same emission charge for all polluting industries would ensure this would occur and we’d get the lowest societal cost for the given reduction in pollution.
But it has been said - I forget by who - that the trouble with economists is that they don’t know the difference between a fee and a fine. I guess in some of these things it somehow matters that everyone reduces their harmful activity. Whilst a fee is just a price, a fine is something more. What that is I’m not quite sure. But I know that I feel differently when a rich bloke lights up (and I don’t) in a non-smoking venue because he can easily pay the fine to how I do when he buys a bottle of wine that’s out of my price range.
So the answer to your question lies in what you think speeding tickets are supposed to do and whether it’s justified - if it’s just to reduce dangerous behaviour and no-one cares if you’re hit by a Fiat or a Rolls, fixed dollar amounts are the way to go. If you do care who does the adjusting and want every person to adjust their behaviour to much the same degree, fines proportional to income are going to do that. It looks like you think the latter. Can you say why?
As an addition to your question erislover: is it the case that fixed fines are equivalent to shorter prison sentences for high wage earners? After all, they have a higher opportunity cost of time.
Germany uses a sliding scale for traffic violations (possibly other stuff too).
Personally, I’d say given how much tax-dodging goes on once you get to an income level at which you can afford an accountant, I don’t think it would be possible with a tax system as overwritten as ours. Finland and Germany use much simpler ones, I believe.
A related point I’d like to make (I thought this was what the article was about when I read the title): What about the fact that many fines/fees are put on the books at a fixed about and stay there for decades despite changing economic conditions and inflation.
There are an innumerable number of example of fines that were set by the lawmakers to be “appropriate” in the economy decades ago, which still bear the same montary amount today, which is effectively very different. Why don’t lawmakers (at all levels, including cities and their traffic fines) put in clauses to auto-adjust the fines based on the changing value of the dollar due to inflation?
When it comes to traffic, Im not under the impression that fines are there to reduce speed and improve safety…they are there to collect revenue.
If you increased speeding fines for example, people would speed less and less revenue would be collected. Conversely, if you reduced fines too much, there would be an increase not only in accidents but gas usage, etc with no increase in revenue. So there is an upper bound and lower bound within which fines are and within which they will remain; to go to far in either direction would result in a loss of revenue.
Fines are nothing but left-handed taxation and are inequtable metes of punishments and should be restricted to high crimes like parking meter violations and jay-walking.
Take Jack for hypothetical example. Jack got a speeding ticket and the fine was 300 dollars. Jack drives a truck delivering cookies and his net income is 300 dollars per week. Jack’s family will go be forced to go without some luxuries like hard candy and bar soap so that Jack can pay the courts the 300 dollar fine. Big deal!
But Jack it seems was not speeding much so in a huff he goes to court and the judge still finds him guilty and fines him 300 dollars plus 75 dollars court costs. Too bad Jack.
What Jack should have done is to hire a cheap but well positioned lawyer for 500 dollars and take a chance on beating the rap because upon conviction his state-required automobile insurance will now go up 20 dollars a month. But this doesn’t matter because the insurance company that insures the company trucks at the bakery where Jack works will now drop him from it’s “approved driver” rolls and Jack will be fired. Well, all we can say is … tough janets, Jackson, next time don’t speed!
So now we know who suffers dearly from the instigation of these fines, namely, little kiddies and clean women, now l will list those who profit:
(a) Politicians and the courts. ( My tennis partner for a while last year was a judge who like to boast to all who would listen that his court operations had a operating ratio of 85-15 of costs to profit and didn’t cost the good citizenry of the county a dime.
(b) Guess?..aw shucks you got it… lawyers.
In a society that considers all men equal, the only punishments that are equatable to all men are jail time and community service, and if we are really mad, …hanging.
It may be relevant to ask what is the actual effect of the current system of fines that don’t scale with income. The OP’s thesis would seem to imply that the rich must do substantially more speeding, jaywalking and other minor lawbreaking, since the fines for these offenses are too small to deter.
OTOH if we don’t find the expected millionaire jaywalking crimewave, we can then begin to wonder whether maybe the current scheme is okay.
I’m not sure I understand your objection here Milum. Are you saying that if there is inflation, fines should decrease in value and if there is deflation fines should increase in value? If so, why?
There are such schemes, and where I live (Melbourne, Australia) pretty much has one. Penalties for speeding, building regulation infractions, fishing offences etc etc are all expressed in “penalty units” which all change in money value together. This means that the penalty for poaching abalone relative to that of failing to give way at a roundabout stays the same rather than requiring the amendment of all the bits of legislation involving fines.
My objection Hawthorne, was more philosophical than pragmatic.
What I said was… because of the self-aggrandizing nature of all governments, all men are overtaxed well beyond their collective service needs, and therefore any citizen who would willingly suggest ways for his politicians to increase their incoming revenues and our outgoing taxes by adjusting court fines for inflation needs immediate corrective brain surgery because his thinking has become ( to put it in medical terms) “out of whack”.
Personally I am flat against all fines above the cost of a pint of rum as they are inherently inequitable as instruments of justice.
On the other hand I do like the Melbourne, Australia idea of assigning penalty units for petty violations.
My version would have a culminative pre-set number of penalty units that would automatically require a fixed time in jail. Then the petty offender could start accumulating his units anew.
Sadly it seems that anytime monetary considerations are brought into play, the base in mankind always prevails.
Fair enough (although I’m not sure I agree). You would love a colleague of mine, who purported to demonstrate the desireable properties of allocation by price by auctioning off places in popular tutorial times for a class he was teaching and burning the proceeds in public.
No, No, No,. You have to look at the gap. The rich are getting criminallier and the poor are getting lawfullier. Higher fines for many petty crimes will make them more attractive to rich people.
I don’t know about that. While I agree that fines are a source of revenue for the government, they also serve as a deterrent. Parking tickets aren’t a moving violation so the only factor which would possibly stop someone from not paying the meter is the cost factor. Assuming you actually agree, to some extent, with parking regulations, then I am not sure I see why jail time is any more appropriate than a fine, other than you want to make punishing people more expensive. A dubious proposition.
Maybe not jaywalking, since tickets for that are kind of arbitrary, but I suspect looking at speeding or parking tickets will turn up something interesting, one way or another. Although I cannot find a cite one way or the other, I would not find it unbelievable that the number of speeding or parking tickets per mile driven correlates with the income of the driver, or with the price of the car.
