Actually I wouldn’t mind that. That’s a great idea.
I find it perfectly OK. If you work for a living, at least, paying a fine means that for a shorter or longer duration, you’re working to fill the community chest rather than for your own benefit.
A fine that would cost a minimum-wage schlub a week’s pay can worked off by the high income earner in an hour, so looking at time spent paying your debt to society, as it were, fixed fines are horrendously unfair.
We could of course cut out the middleman and let poor and rich alike do community service - working for society directly for a fixed number of hours - but the value produced by, say, a hedge fund manager doing community service is probably rather marginal compared to the amount he could provide if he hedged funds for the same duration of time and handed over the income.
I assume we agree that community service, for instance, should be for the same number of hours, no matter the income of the offender?
The only problem I have with this is the bureaucratic one: It’s too cumbersome to have to determine the offender’s income or wealth every time a speeding ticket is issued.
On the other hand, the community service idea has some real merit: An hour’s an hour for everyone. By making the fine a certain number of hours, you really do make the punishment the same for everyone, without any excessive bureaucracy necessary.
I think it could be a great idea in Happy Perfect Land, but I’m not sure that it would actually work. I think that ideally, fines wouldn’t be assessed in flat dollars, but in something called, say, a Fine Unit (or FU :D). Speeding would be worth, say, 2 FUs. The exact value of an FU would be determined by some wizardry taking into account wealth and income. But then you have the problems Absolute mentions, which I’m not sure are totally insurmountable, but they would probably require a major change in the way the justice system works in some places. (If a town has 45 people and 10 of them have a salary paid out of the village coffers, 90% of which comes from the revenooers on the slice of highway the village annexed for the purpose of doing traffic enforcement, then this would be a problem.)
But if he hedged funds as punishment he’d miss out on fresh country air, accented with the dirty diaper on route 401.
I think the idea of community service as punishment isn’t as much value returned to society, but respect gained for it.
The rich person and the poor person should be treated the same.
But “treated the same” is ambiguous.
Should they be fined the same amount, or should they be fined the same fraction of income? Both of these count as ways to “treat them the same.” How do you side which one applies?
It depends, at least in part, on what the purpose of the fine is.
So what’s the purpose of the fine?
Is it to disincentivize speeding? Since $200 is less likely to disincentivize a rich person than a poor person, it would seem that on this account of fines we should adjust the amount depending on income.
Is the purpose of the fine to create income for the state? Then assuming that higher fines for rich people issue forth in greater income for the state, the fine should be adjusted by income.
Is the purpose to recuperate the average cost imposed on society by acts of speeding? Then the fine should not be adjusted for income.
Etc.
The OP can’t be resolved til we know why we’re fining people.
Not necessarily. For example, the wage earner is probably more likely to lose his job over lost hours than are many categories of professional.
(An hour is an hour for everyone in the same way a dollar is a dollar for everyone. But a single dollar means more to some people. And a single hour means more to some people.)
Are fines supposed to be a deterrent to breaking the speed limit? I can see how a small fine would deter a poor person from speeding, but how does a small fine deter someone with multiple millions from speeding?
What do you think the purpose of speeding tickets are?
You have a valid point. However the amount of free time you can have in a week is by definition a lot less variable than the amount of money you can make so it approaches truer equal punishment.
That said, I don’t see why it has to all be in the same week. If you can document you work two jobs then I say it’s fair to divide the community service up into less hours but more weeks, so instead of 20 one week you spend 5 weeks doing 4 hours.
I’m against unequal fines. But think that fines should increase on a sliding scale according to how far above the speed limit one is traveling (like they mostly do already). For a second offense, suspend their license. That could be a real deterrent for high-flying driving enthusiasts.
If the punishment is financial in nature, shouldn’t that punishment be in proportion to that individual’s wealth?
If we began progressively fining speeding tickets based on the wealth of the offender, wouldn’t that necessitate similar action for all fine-based infractions? The argument would be the same no matter what the individual violation was, like running a red light or not wearing a seat belt, etc.
This seems like absolute bureaucratic lunacy to me.
I think it depends on the state’s motivation for giving speeding tickets. I can think of at least 3:
- Discourage people from speeding - a flat fine either doesn’t discourage wealthy people from speeding or absolutely crushes everyone else. If the state wants to reduce speeding, the penalty needs to matter to everyone. Either scaled fines or community service serve this purpose.
- Pay for the negative externalities of speeding. It isn’t any worse to be hit by a 2012 Lexus than a 94 Honda, in terms of police response, traffic jams, and time and hassle caused to the innocent party. If the goal of speeding tickets is to cover the costs imposed by speeding, the ticket should be a fixed amount.
- Fund state operations. You can’t get blood from a stone. For maximum revenue, a scaled fee that doesn’t really discourage speeding would probably collect the most revenue.
In hopes that the system is designed to prevent speeding, especially egregious speeding, I would promote a formula that ran something like (gross income)(% over the speed limit)(.005) or maybe something that scaled linearly by income but exponentially by speed. I’m not wedded to that formula.
What I REALLY want to know is exactly what he did with Miss Ellie May, the cute Lady Druggist…
I have no interest what Andy and Helen Crump did to each other, although I guess Helen and Thelma Lou together may have some appeal…
Screw “equality.” Make the rich bastards bleed. They only way they are “equal” to the rest of us is spiritually, if you believe in that stuff. I don’t, so make the punishment as painful for them as it would be for someone making minimum wage. X% of their weekly income, for example. Hell, execute them. I’ve got no use for anybody who threatens society by driving 180 on public roads.
I am against this system as much as I’m against the present system. Either is simply unfair.
What I’d like to see is licence suspensions in lieu of financial penalties. That would affect everyone way more equally.
When you are poor it is worse. If you get a speeding ticket and can not come up with the 150 bucks, they will revoke your license. Then, if you get pulled over while driving to work, you can be arrested due to a warrant . Now you have real trouble. You will lose your license and perhaps get jail time. The cost goes up . I wonder how many poor people are in jail caused by not being able to afford a fine?
Are the rich and poor treated the same? The impact is not the same. The results are surely different.
If rich criminals should be given larger fines, should young criminals be given longer jail sentences? As it is, an 18 year old being sent up for armed robbery is going to spend a much smaller percentage of his remaining life span behind bars than an 80 year old committing the same crime.
What’s the point in being rich if you can’t buy a fast car and enjoy it? You shouldn’t speed unreasonably like examples in the original post but, who doesn’t enjoy speeding a little?