Nokia president has to pay a $103,600 fine for doing 47mph in a 31mph zone
What do you think about income-related fines?
It makes some degree of sense. When you have fines that are crushing for some people, and nothing at all for others, you essentially give a certain segment of society the right to ignore the law. We see this all the time in San Francisco, where a lot of people simply park on the sidewalk when they can’t find a space. They gladly eat the fines in exchange for great parking spaces, and the city has come to rely on those fines as part of their income. Meanwhile, the citizens who are trying to walk down those sidewalks are forced out in to the streets- and there are a staggering amount of pedestrian deaths each year.
People drive up onto the side walk and park?
I like the idea, but I think it would cause too many problems if implemented. Cops would certainly be tempted into taking bribes, and rich people would tie up courtrooms fighting 100k speeding fines (and rightfully so). There are much easier, more transparent ways of taking money from rich people (if that’s the goal).
I don’t think that is the goal at all. The goal is to make sure that a punitive penalty is just that - fix the speeding fine at £100, and the Nokia chief could pay it out of loose change. And note that he didn’t fight the fine (btw, it’s a 3-year-old story). And finally, bribery of police depends far more on the culture they’re working within than on the fines they’re handing out.
There’s nothing certain about it.
So what?
How much is the fine? Man, if someone did that in Chicago I think Daley’s head would explode, right after he had the car towed and fined you 60% of the cars’ value! Hell parking tickets are routinely 75-100 bucks here, if you get towed count on shelling out $165 MINIMUM to get your car out of their evil clutches. That’s one of the main reasons I try to drive the work truck in the city as much as possible 
It makes perfect sense to me. A fine is only prohibitive inasmuch as it represents a noticeable amount of money. This is contrast to a token fee meant to discourage freeloading or hoarding, like parking meters (though of course other means are also used, including fines). There is a serious potential for shoddy determinations, however, but so long as income is represented realistically (a debate in itself, I’m sure) I think it is a sound idea.
I’m all for it.
Especially if IT professionals are exempt. 
I wonder if police officers would be more likely to go after the big fish rather then the little fish. Some guy in a Saturn going 15 above the speed limit, who cares? Let’s wait for that guy in the Hummer going 10 above the limit and bust him.
I wonder if it would be Constitutional. You would essentially be giving different sentences for the same violation. I don’t care how rich you are you shouldn’t be fined $10,000 for jaywalking.
Marc
Why not, if it’s a proportionate amount? The idea is to dissuade further law-defiance, and in this society, a monetary penalty it pretty much the only way to send that message.
I can’t think of a fairer way than to scale the amount of the infraction up or down in accordance with one’s income. It would then send a message that’s consistent across all income levels.
I think it is. In the US, I think most people realize traffic fines are more about raising money than punishing people in hopes of curbing the number of infractions in a given year. It is a fairly well known fact that cops have informal quotas for the number of tickets they write and the amount of money they earn in fines. Fines around here are basically another tax. That why I think that if you are going to gouge rich people for money, you should do it in a more honest, upfront way.
I think bribery would be a big problem under this system. I can see cops being tempted to rip up a $50,000 ticket for a few hundred bucks? I don’t think it’s fair to put them in that position. Plus, you would then have to make available, the yearly incomes of 300 million people. That seems like a lot of work that would need to be done just to stick it to rich people.
What about all the other crimes where there’s a big punishment at stake? I repeat, corruption is about the culture they’re working in, not the money available. And in any case, how would they know at the time that they were dealing with such a large fine? All they know is that they’ve caught somebody speeding. The fine gets calculated much later on.
‘Make available’? Don’t they already file tax returns, pay income tax, etc? So that information shouldn’t be hard to provide to the courts or whoever sets the fine.
I don’t think fines should be used as a punishment for crimes for precisely the reasons of proportionality discussed above. If Bill Gates, a middle-class citizen of average means, and a homeless person are all convicted in the Commonwealth of Virginia of a Class 4 felony, and each are fined not more than $100,000, the middle-class citizen might be wiped out, while the fine would be essentially meaningless (for opposite reasons) to both the multi-billionaire and the homeless person. The sentence of not less than two years nor more than 10 years imprisonment would presumably have a roughly equal effect on a regular guy as it would on Bill Gates or a panhandler; everyone has roughly the same amount of life, and everyone presumably values their liberty. (I’d make a distinction between criminal fines and restitution; making someone who has taken something by robbery, larceny, or fraud give back their ill-gotten gains, if possible, seems to me a different thing.)
I’m not sure that this principle can be easily applied to minor infractions like traffic tickets, though. One possibility would be to replace fines with community service, since Bill Gates and Joe Average both have the same number of hours each Saturday afternoon for the next six months. Of course, everyone would hate this: I’m sure the great majority of lead-footed motorists would far rather pay a fine than spend however many weekends picking up trash alongside the highway; and most jurisdictions would far rather have the cash than a lot of unskilled labor.
You know, I keep hearing about these quotas for traffic and parking tickets. What I never hear is what the quota is and why it’s impossible for a cop to reach it while only writing legitimate tickets.
I do know a few other things, though
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I can’t drive for half an hour without seeing at least ten people do something for which they could legitimately receive a moving violation ticket. Add in parking violations and the number goes way up.
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I’ve never known anyone who got a ticket for a moving violation who did not actually commit a moving violation.
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I’ve known plenty of people who’ve gotten warnings instead of tickets, including one who was warned three times by the same cop before getting a ticket the fourth time he caught her.
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I’ve known people who got somewhat inaccurate tickets (for going ten mph over the speed limit rather than the twenty they were really doing) which were written inaccurately specifically to lower the fine.
If cops have a quota which can easily be met by writing only legitimate tickets, it’s not at all clear to me that the reason for the quotas and tickets is to raise money rather than to deter infractions.
Don’t see why it would be unconstitutional. There are different sentences for the same crime as it is . Some people get probation while others go to prison for the same offense.
Do you have a cite on this other than “It is fairly well known…?” I know I’ve read it, but I can’t remember ever seeing this as a fact. It’s always seemed more like a cranky assumption.
Well, seeing that fines that are arduous on low income people don’t seem to stop them from commiting traffic offenses, I think this is a ridiculous idea. In Alberta you can get only so many tickets before they take your license away. I assume it is similar in other places. At that point it doesn’t matter how rich you are.
Frankly, if there was a chance that I’d be fined all out of proportion of the offense, I think I’d be moving my money somewhere else and looking for a more rational place to live.
If I recall my ancient history correctly, I believe ancient Babylon under the code of Hammurabi did, in fact, have at least some “scaling fine” offenses where rich violators paid more in aboslute terms than poor ones.
We’re used to seeing fine as X units of money… but what if they were X% of income? So perhaps a moving violation would be 1/10 of 1% of your gross yearly income. Although a fine paid by Bill Gates would, in abosolute numbers, be much higher than a fine paid by myself for a similar infraction, I think you can argue that the pain caused to each of us economically would be far more equal than if we were both fined an aboslute $2,000 because $2,000 is a much higher portion of my income than it is of Bill Gates’.
One problem with this is that very wealthy people can have very low incomes…
So how 'bout X% of net worth?
Z% of the value of the vehicle (so that Hummer would in fact garner more income than my 1990 Cavalier)?
X% of net worth multiplied by Y% of income divided by the cosine Z% of the value of the vehicle parsed by the full moon in Virgo?
We can get as complicated as we like, it all boils down to: should people with more money suffer a similar hurt to the wallet as poorer people when they choose to break the law? I think so, and I also think it would greatly benefit the states if half of this new money went into schools and park districts.
Wasn’t there an email a while back that showed Gate’s income by the minute, and pointed out that it’s more costly for him to take the time to bend over and pick up a dropped $100 bill than to just leave it on the ground and go on with his day? A $100 parking ticket means less than losing his napkin at a picnic.