If traffic fines were handed out to random road users for no reason, I’d be really sympathetic to this argument.
No, it’s not the same punishment, but that’s life. Rich people have lives that are in some ways made easier by money. IMO, the fine should pay for the administration of enforcing traffic - the licence penalty should be the deterrent.
If taking money from a person is suppose to be a deterrent against driving over a certain speed then yes it has to be that way, actually it should be worded that the fine is $50 million for speeding, but the person’s economic circumstances will be considered so that a person making $50k/y only pays $50 bucks or so.
If taking money from a person is suppose to be a way of collecting revenue from people driving, which arguably it is, then again yes it makes sense as people who make more can pay more.
I can not think of any honest reason why the same dollar amount fine should be charged as a fine by civil authority without taking into account that person’s economic circumstances and the impact on their livelihood.
Pulled over regularly. If he can not pay a ticket price and drives to work, he is more vulnerable than a white person who does the same thing. He is far more likely to get pulled over, especially if he drives through a white community.
Trying to get to work so you can make enough money to pay off the fine could result in a much bigger problem.
It should be based on how fast they were going, not how much money they make. Should a rich person pay a million dollar fine for going 5 mph above the speed limit? No.
By the same token, a poor person probably doesn’t own a supercar that can reach 240 mph (or whatever the fuck that is in kph). The driver should get a massive fine (but probably not hundreds of thousands of dollars) for traveling 85mph in what I assume is probably a 25mph zone because it is incredible reckless, not because they are rich.
If they do it enough times, they should have their license taken away.
If the point is deterrence, I have absolutely no problem with this. However, since the point of speeding fines is generally not deterrence, it’s kind of dumb.
I am not certain this is normally expected, and I definitely don’t think it should normally be expected.
Stating a position and defending it in an OP is one acceptable thing to do in GD.
Another acceptable thing to do, IMO, is state a position with an invitation for people to give reasons against it–with the understanding that you’ll come back to reply to those reasons in short order.
Fair enough, and that of course puts community service in a different class of punishment than paying a fine. Still, we seem to agree that if we’re confiscating somebody’s time as punishment, we should be taking about the same amount of it from everybody.
I admit the practical considerations - focus on penalizing high-income people for the higher fine potential, bureaucracy involved etc. - but as a principle, I think it holds up perfectly well. In a Swiss context - organized like (pardon) clockwork, no tradition of corruption in law enforcement, courts with little patience for stupid antics etc. - I can certainly see it being practical as well.
Nonsense. Confinement is clearly a far lesser punishment for someone who can barely get out of bed anyway than it is for a person in the prime of life. The example (of how absurd the basic concept postulated in the OP gets when one tries to actually apply it) stands.
I would argue the opposite. A person with the zeal and vigor of youth is more negatively affected by confinement than a person who just wants to lay in bed all day.
This, in every way. The police must be absolutely salivating about the prospect here. Hell, busting a guy with the temerity to be driving a Lamborghini for 10 over and staying in the flow of traffic would make most of their budget for a year.
So is a speeding ticket supposed to be a deterrent to speeding or not? And if so, is it supposed to be a deterrent, but only for poor people?
mosier, I think we can largely dispense with the pretense that speeding tickets for any but the most egregious cases are more about deterrence than revenue, can’t we?
Something we’re still waiting for here, if you haven’t noticed. This OP is so far just another hit-and-run.
I’m against the idea, mostly because of the need to investigate earnings in some fashion (tax filings, worth of the car being driven, whatever).
Fines plus eventual license revocation cover both sides pretty well; someone who blows off multiple citations, rich or poor, eventually loses permission to drive, with the implication that the rich can afford to blow off more citations and so eventually get a higher punishment if they insist on being stupid. That I think is sufficiently self-regulating.
I view them as an additional tax on reckless people. Kinda like lottery tickets are an additional tax on people bad at math.
When I see a sign saying it is a 15,000 dollar fine for killing a worker, I visualize Warren Buffet pulling up and saying 'here’s 30 k ,I am in a hurry".
So it’s a tax, then? If it’s a tax, why shouldn’t it be a progressive one?
That sounds like more of an argument against funding police departments with ticket income than an argument against income-based tickets.
Five dollars is worth just as much to a rich man as a poor man - it’s not like a rich man can buy more with his five dollars than anyone else. It’s just that he has a whole bunch more five dollars than anyone else.
Similarly, a young man and an old man could spend a year of their lives doing the same thing, but a young man has many more years left to him than an old man. By the logic of this thread, a year in jail to a person expecting to have another fifty of them is not as harsh a punishment as a year to a man who only has ten or so left.
Judging by the examples in the OP, the fines appear to be linked not just to wealth, but to the degree of reckless driving. The two examples given are driving 85 through a village (which, I’m guessing, has a pretty low posted speed limit) and doing 185 mph on a freeway. It doesn’t appear that the laws in Europe are set up to allow six-figure fines for going ten over the limit, so it seems that should be the model we’re arguing over in this thread. Although presumably, even at low speeds, a rich driver would still pay more, but not to the extent that one collar makes their entire budget for the year. I think your argument still at least partially applies, though - expensive cars would still be targeted more often than cheap beaters, possibly to the over-all detriment of public safety.
Same in Canada - you get demerit points for traffic violations. This is a fair and equal deterrent, even if the fine isn’t.
Well it’s an optional “tax” like other sin taxes - should taxes on cigarettes and alcohol be progressive as well?
But even then, some else could argue that the punishment falls more harshly upon the poor person’s shoulders. Most white-collar jobs work M-F, and the white-collar worker can more easily sustain the mandated weekend’s work. Indeed, if we imagine the assignment cutting into work hours, the wealthy person can afford to miss a day or two of work without serious financial consequences.