You may feel it’s strained but it reflects the reality of how many poor people live. A five hundred dollar debt isn’t just an inconvenience; it can be a life changing event.
If you have somebody who’s working a low-wage job on a fulltime basis and is just covering their basic expenses, they don’t have an extra five hundred dollars and they’re not going to get it in the foreseeable future. If you tell them that five hundred dollars is going to come out of their salary, then you are forcing them to leave that job. They can’t afford to work at a job where they won’t have enough money left to pay their rent. So they start collecting welfare and working under the table. And that five hundred dollar barrier will prevent them from ever going back on a real payroll.
Who benefits from this? The person involved certainly didn’t. The city didn’t - it didn’t collect that five hundred dollars. The taxpayers didn’t - they just had another person enter the welfare rolls. Everyone would have been a lot better off if the city had just decided to forgive that parking ticket fine rather than make a futile effort to collect a fine that was uncollectable.
Enforcement of traffic laws is a funny thing. You see, the overwhelming majority of drivers don’t obey the traffic laws. They do things like speed, fail to use turn signals, fail to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, etc.
The number of people who get tickets is not a function of how law abiding people are, it’s a function of how many tickets the PD decides they want to write. The moment their ticket writing policies are governed by finance instead of public safety is the moment they lose the high moral ground in this discussion, and they become predators instead of peace keepers.
Also, let’s not forget that intermingled with traffic offenses and the like, are blatantly unconstitutional arrests for Failure To Comply; arrests in violation of the 4th Amendment; arrests for Making A False Declaration; and so forth. One shouldn’t assume that a person issued a citation or arrested in Ferguson has actually committed a crime.
It’s interesting how liberals believe that court costs can be a disincentive to work, but exorbitant tax rates and welfare phaseouts pose no such problem.
The problem with your little gotcha is, you assume poor people and rich people value money the same way. Poor people, having so much less of it, notice the loss of a dollar more than a rich person, who uses them to light cigars. Poor people know the difference between $200 and $200,000, whereas to Fatty McBigbux, that is just what slides unnoticed off the pile of cash he sleeps on.
On the other hand, rich people work harder than poor people, and if there is one thing they will work like beavers to avoid, it is becoming poor. The higher we raise taxes, the harder they work to make up the difference; it is in their nature. The point of diminishing returns is around 97%, where even their industrious little hearts burst from the effort to keep up, so we back off the top marginal rate to 90%, and they happily run on their little wheels, generating fat cash for socialist programs, plus enough to keep themselves in mansions and yachts. It really is a win-win, only they work for us now.
It’s interesting how you ignore the vacuous nature of your position in post #36 which was identified in post #42, 43, 46, 48, and 57. Is that intentional?
As an aside, I note with approval the innovations of traffic fines practiced in Finland, where traffic fines are relative to income. To oversimplify, a poor guy speeds, gets a $100 fine, the rich guy speeds, gets a $100,000 fine.
No, “finding” is used more like “conclusion” than “fact”.
** What the FBI found** was the evidence on which they based the findings in the report.
Is that clear?
I have no idea why the word is used this way, if it is just a drift in meaning, or if ‘finding’ never was a gerund …
A previous prime minister, John Major, and part of the Tory party, tried to bring this in in Britain during the 1990s. He was massacred for this by the Daily Mail and the rest of the Tory Party, since giving differing sentences according to income was unfair discrimination against wealthy people and contrary to basic decency.
So, both the chap earning £300k a year, and the fellow earning £30k a year still pay the same £1000 fine.
This might come as news to you but poor people have less money than middle class people or rich people. So problems, like being homeless, that are caused by a lack of money tend to strike poor people. Tax rates and welfare phaseouts are designed so the negative effects on poor people is minimized.
So that thing you find “interesting” about the way these programs are designed is called “intelligence”. (I know conservatives also have a thing they call “intelligent design” but it’s not the same.)
Granted. One ought to avoid such life-changing events when possible. Therefore the laws against (for instance) driving without insurance ought to be enforced strenuously, since being hit by an uninsured motorist can be a life-changing event that a poor person might not be able to withstand.
I suspect that many of those under discussion are already on welfare, unemployed, and/or working off the books.
This amounts to an argument that poor people should not have to obey some of the laws.
In the case of Ferguson, the court order is that no one, rich or poor, should be held accountable to warrants issued by a police department that has been shown to be biased in its enforcement of the law. This isn’t a free pass for poor people, it is justice for all people.
As a general matter, you are absolutely correct. But the laws in Ferguson were not being enforced for that reason. They were being enforced to fund law enforcement and the municipal court system itself in a self-perpetuating cycle of unconstitutionally targeted policing.
Now they won’t be, but the new municipal judge doesn’t have time to go back and review the work of his corrupt predecessors.
In case you are not aware, the purpose of the warrant system is to impose a gatekeeper - the issuing judge or magistrate - between law enforcement and the target of the warrant. The judges in Ferguson were until now merely a rubber stamp. As has been pointed out several times, dismissing the warrants does not dismiss the underlying crimes. It merely requires the authorities to provide probable cause for the warrant’s reissuance (something that should have been required in the past, but seems to have been overlooked to keep the money coming in).
No matter what the motive, one of the end results of the enforcement was to deter violations of the traffic laws. As of now, that enforcement has ended, more or less.
I don’t see how the particulars of this instance mean that the general matter is invalidated.
On what do you base your conclusion that violations of traffic laws were deterred by Ferguson’s policing for revenue scheme? Did overall violations decrease over a measurement period? Did collections from this scheme decrease?
Think of it this way - if a warrant is issued because it was based on fabricated statements by police and bribes to the judge, do we think that the underlying target of the warrant has somehow gotten away with something if the warrant is invalidated? No, that is justice. All of the existing infractions can be reheard - the alleged violations or infractions can still be pursued. But because the taint of policing for revenue permeated the existing pool of warrants, they were thrown out. The crimes themselves can be pursued anew, free from the prior taint.
Is there any evidence that it actually deterred anything? Considering that revenue was pretty clearly the primary motivation, the last thing the cops wanted to do was deter their big money maker.
Based on the DOJ report, the actual behavior of those ticketed seemed to be far less important then just what the city identified as easy targets to make money.