I didn’t say a word about punishing anyone. What I said was that when you own and drive a car, you’ve assumed a set of responsibilities, regardless of your wealth level. And most of those responsibilities center around making your vehicle safe for others on the road and proving that if you fuck someone else’s car up, you can pay for it.
I was always taught that if you can’t fulfill a responsibility, you shouldn’t take it on. Owning and driving a car is in essence giving someone, in this case the driving public, your word that you’ll keep your car up and have insurance in case you make a mistake.
In my mind, all that stuff about whether or not it’s hard, or onerous or whatever else is extraneous bullshit. You don’t take on responsibilities that you don’t think you can fulfill, and if you do take them on, you move heaven and fucking earth to be responsible. Part of being responsible is taking your consequences if you don’t live up to what you agreed to. Anything else is dishonest and assholish, and poverty doesn’t have a damn thing to do with that.
Library books are no different in this respect. If you agree to pay the fines and suffer the consequences, then that’s what you do if you can’t return them on time. Anything else is asshole behavior and excuses.
Yet despite that, we have people who, in essence are advocating treating the poor as if they’re toddlers and unable to be responsible, or tell right from wrong, and excusing this sort of casual dishonesty as ok, because they can’t help it.
I suspect that this sort of irresponsibility and the acceptance of it probably does nobody any favors when it comes to them actually getting out of poverty.
Penalties should be proportionate to the wrong-doing.
There’s a vast difference between a penalty that costs 1% of your monthly income, one that costs 10% of that, or one that costs 100% of what you earn in a month. Perhaps fines and penalties should be assessed based on income or personal wealth - it’s not an entirely new idea, it was in the Code of Hammurabi in 1700 BC.
The fact is, even with proper auto insurance a car accident that is a minor inconvenience to someone wealthy could be financially shattering for the likes of me. It’s not about being stupid or irresponsible, it’s about having fewer resources.
I’m in favor of policy that makes the lives of the poor easier. Don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think you should remove incentives in order to modify behavior.
There are incentives and then there are punishments that just make life harder and more miserable.
I mean, absolutely, poor people who own cars need to pass emissions tests and be insured just like everyone else, they also have the obligation to keep their car safe and drive carefully. However, as a hypothetical example, if you make it obligatory that everyone, rich and poor alike, must have insurance that covers replacement of a totaled vehicle with a brand new car then you’ll be pricing a lot of responsible poor drivers out of the market. Right now my insurance covers ONLY liability - so really, I’m doing more to take care of anyone I might hit than I am putting towards myself, but it makes insurance something I can afford and minimizes the effects felt by others of any mistakes I might make. I simply can’t afford to pay for replacement insurance as well.
There are also significant differences in how you approach helping the poor. You could have a state where if they don’t find work in a given time period they’re simply cut off from any form of aid. That’s… not really helpful. I mean, it makes people more desperate and that will certainly goad some into getting a job, any job… but you could also take a different approach where, if they don’t get work after that time period you mandate they get some sort of counseling to determine WHY they couldn’t find work and try to help them fix that. When I went through it in my state I was asked some very pointed questions, like “what sort of transportation do you have?” “Are you aware of the bus network or need help in using it?” “Does your car need repairs?” (my state does have a limited about of grants and loans to assist the very poor in these matters so transportation is no longer an obstacle to finding work) “Do you have a health problem?” “Do you need childcare?” “Does anyone in your house need elder care of care for a handicapped adult?” “Do you need help with resume, interview, or job hunting skills?” “Do you need better clothes for job interviews?” So instead of immediatley cutting someone off you actually try to fix the problems that are getting in their way. Does it work all the time? Of course not. But it does get some people on their feet and on the road to being self-supporting. Which might have something to do with why my state’s unemployment rate is under 5% most months. Even if a significant number of those poor folks still receive some aid the fact they have some income reduces the amount of aid they get, which relieves the overall burden on society. Which I view as a good thing.
What’s stupid is when cutting back and cutting back doesn’t make things better but there are continued calls to keep doing the exact same thing. If what you’re doing isn’t getting the results you want then try something different.
And finally - we need, as a society, to recognize that there are some people so messed up they aren’t going to be fixed. You can punish them all you want, it won’t make things better. It seems more humane to just take care of such people rather than trying to goad them to do something they just can’t. Of course, there is the problem of identifying such people, but any social worker or person involved in that area is going to be able to point to examples of such. It might be someone who’s been a drug addicts for decades, someone mentally ill or mentally handicapped or so traumatized by something they simply can’t function normally anymore. Beating them up solves nothing.
Lel. Nah rich people are jacking off to premium paid porn sites from the comfort of their Tempur-Pedic with a couple boxes of Kleenex Tissue with Aloe Vera nearby to clean up after they’ve finished the deed.
And you will only make things worse for everyone. Because if a person can’t drive because they can’t afford to pay their speeding ticket, which means they can’t get to work, which means they can’t pay their rent, then why wouldn’t that person just say “fuck it” and rob a liquor store? At that point, they have nothing to lose.
Over 40% of student borrowers aren’t making payments on their debt. Now, some of these borrowers probably could pay and for whatever reason (waiting for Bernie to swoop down and save them perhaps?) they just aren’t. But I’m guessing a whole lot of them aren’t paying because they can’t afford to. Wage garnishing is the “obvious” solution, but that should send shivers up everyone’s spines. If people are already finding it close to impossible to make ends now, how does garnishing their lowly wages NOT push them over the edge to “fuck this shit!!” territory, where robbing a liquor store is a reasonable choice? How does having a significant proportion of the population enslaved by a “poor” choice made in young adulthood (signing up for a private loan so you can make Mommy and Daddy proud one day) benefit society? It doesn’t. But the “we all make choices!” crowd is perfectly willing to watch society crumble all around us so that individuals learn that actions–no matter how reasonable–have consequences, no matter how tragic.
Wage garnishment only goes so far - the goal is to force repayment and not bankruptcy. Society doesn’t benefit if you garnish someone into homelessness.
And MY opinion is that we should pay more attention to rehabilitation if we want to lower the recidivism rate. Revenge can feel good temporarily, like a cocaine rush, but in the long term neither of those is a good thing.
So poor people shouldn’t have to obey the laws against speeding, because if we try to enforce those laws, they will rob liquor stores.
And who determines what they can afford? If they are spending money on beer or lottery tickets, and would have to give that up for six months to pay the ticket, does that count? Do we just take their word for what they can afford? If so, great - I can’t afford to pay for my speeding tickets either. If not, how do we tell?
According to what I’m saying, you’re doing just fine- you’re carrying the required liability insurance. If you want more than that, it’s your business.
However, if you were to cause a wreck and the damage/injuries go beyond your coverage limits, I’d expect you to pay up, as that’s YOUR responsibility to make the other person whole, regardless of your financial status. I suspect a lot of people on here would cry and wring their hands about how unfair that is, and that’s kind of my point- why is it unfair to expect someone to be responsible in that situation even if it’s uncomfortable?
How do you handle that exactly? Seems like in those situations, they ought to be institutionalized, or at the very least, be monitored or otherwise compelled to be as minimal of a burden on the rest of society as possible. It’s pretty much the definition of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, if you let them have all the freedom and free choice to continually screw it up at others’ expense.
And that’s part of my point- there are some people who can’t be responsible- I get that. But treating them like they can be responsible isn’t going to work either. The ones who can be responsible, should be made to be responsible insofar as they can be responsible. And most people can be responsible enough to bring library books back and keep a car maintained to the legal minimums, for example. And anyone who went to college damn well can figure out a way to pay their student loans back, even if it means paying over a longer period, etc… But crying that it’s too hard shouldn’t be condoned- that just condones non-payment of loans, library fines, and keeping cars in good repair, all of which are things that if not done, hurt OTHER people.
I don’t like my taxes going to pay medical bills for people that some uninsured asshole hit with his car, I don’t like my tax money paying for jerks who defaulted on their loans, and I don’t like my taxes being used to pay for additional books for the library where some assholes didn’t bring them back. All that money could be used to fix the roads, pay for healthcare on people who really have no other option, or for foreign aid to the third world, or any number of other more deserving things, than simply being used to cover up for someone else’s irresponsibility.
So there are only two options? Fine someone up the wazoo or let them walk free?
You can’t think of any other penalties out there?
The government doesn’t seem to have a problem figuring out how much a person can afford to pay in taxes. Why would it struggle to do the same calculation when it comes to levying fines against you?
The guy in your hypothetical didn’t seem to think there was any other option.
So one would bring one’s W-2s to court.
Of course that wouldn’t help for those who simply don’t show up in court to settle their tickets, as seemed often to be the case in Ferguson for some of the people complaining about being arrested there. I seem to remember one woman who had five different warrants in four different jurisdictions for all kinds of violations like speeding and no insurance. She wasn’t arrested for the fines; she was arrested for ignoring the tickets altogether.
One of my sisters-in-law was in an automobile wreck a few years ago; her medical alone (not counting the other people, not counting the property damage) topped a million bucks in the first six months. I have no idea what the total is now, eight years on, but it is unlikely she’ll ever work again, and her medical bills remain well into six figures annually.
The guy who caused the wreck was not drunk or impaired, nor was he texting. He apparently just got distracted for a split second, at highway speed. He had more than the required liability coverage. This state requires $25K/person, $50K per accident; he had twice that.
He also has a full-time job, and I’m guessing he makes maybe $30K-35K a year. Even being “uncomfortable,” how long do you think it should take him to pay all the bills?
To my mind, “punishment”, in and of itself, is bullshit.
Rehabilitation is fine and dandy. So is deterrence. So is incapacitation if a person is a serious threat to the well being of other people and there’s no other way of modifying their behavior.
But to punish simply for the sake of punishment, without reference to the actual results of the policy in the real world? That way of looking at things needs to be be abandoned if we want to maximize human wellbeing.
In practice, it’s difficult to neatly separate punishment from deterrence.
When someone engages in an undesirable behavior, the three questions we should ask are: (1) How do we deter people from doing this? (2) If deterrence fails, how do we rehabilitate this person? (3) As a last resort, if we don’t have a way of rehabilitating someone, and they pose a serious risk to other people, we have to simply lock them up.
What I mean by punishment for the sake of punishment is the knee jerk reaction of “fuck this guy, he did something I don’t like, let him suffer” without bothering to look at deterrence and rehabilitation first. That may satisfy a certain primitive urge on our parts, but in the long run it’s just as unfulfilling and empty and as unconducive to our long term wellbeing as a cocaine hit (as Broomstick alluded to earlier).
Let me give a real world example to illustrate the difference between the conservative and liberal mindset. We can hold forth an ideal that people should only have sex if they are married, and if they can financially support a child. In the real world, almost all human beings have a powerful urge to have sex. This urge is still present even amongst those who are unmarried and poor, even amidst strong religious and social injunctions to behave otherwise.
Conservatives will say “fuck 'em, they made a choice to have sex, they should suffer the consequences of their actions!” They ignored the abstinence only education we provided them!
Liberals will say we should accept the reality of human nature, and make the best of it by providing people with contraception. If the contraception fails, and they have children anyway, we’ll provide them with a social safety net.