All people with more income make more money than people with less income. You’ve already agreed this is a fact.
Do you think this is clever? I clearly said that the system would be based on relative size. I gave Sumo wrestler and grandmother as simple to understand expressions of that.
And you ignore that I said it was based on relative size and misrepresent what I said, so you can make a nonsense argument about how some wealthy people who make more income really have less income so you shouldn’t fine them more.
I’d like you to admit your error here, okay?
No, it works fine. Say you make 10k a month and I make 1k. If we’re fined $5,000 and $500 respectively, we both have 50% of our incomes left. It works perfectly.
I’m trying to make punishments equitable because people should be treated equally under the law.
Ah, perfect: so how much do you propose this woman be fined? What non-zero amount is appropriate for someone in her dire situation?
That’s really the only answer I need, if you’re pressed for time.
Have you actually thought that process through? You’d need a full audit for every misdemeanor violation, to some how assess a persons net cash flow.
But even simpler than that, it means a person making $200k with too much house gets a pass. As does his wife who has no income other than what her husband makes.
Where do you propose the police/courts get this magical number representing “how much money is left”?
I like that you consider that a win.
What income? He draws a very modest salary from his company, and most of his income is in dividends and capital gains. How do you propose to make sure he hurts the same as his secretary?
So how many areas that does make now? How many until you realize you’re wrong? I’m going to a movie soon so we might need to speed this along.
Well, he cares I would assume. You’ve taken the food right out of his mouth! Seriously though, if you have that many outliers eventually the term is kind of meaningless. And right here we have back to back failures; you’ve let the wealthy slide through, and hurt the poor. How much worse can this get before you acknowledge it’s worthless?
How long do you imagine this law to be? How many loopholes do you need to create? At some point you’ll realize that income is a piss poor way to measure how much it hurts to lose money. We’re up to three cases in a single post and neither of us are lawyers.
If anything this law will create plenty of work for lawyers, so I guess we could call it a job creation bill.
And this is where we need Bricker because I’m under the impression that each time someone uses one of these “special cases” it because part of case law.
Do you smell asparagus?
If you new and improved criminal code makes it subsequently even easier, wouldn’t you call that yet another failure? We’ve got a forth case where you law does the opposite of what you want it to do. Not just fail, but actively make things worse.
No, it’s me getting a good laugh out of a poorly thought out plan. I won’t even bother counting that one against you.
Awesome. Four gaping holes and you declare victory.
If I had known you work with a 38 year old grandmother from Mexico that could survive caning, I would not argue with you. I mean how more definitive can you be. That is an argument that just wins all.
Not every time. Precedents typically get set at the appellate level. To make case law, you typically need a case to be appealed to the court that can create binding precedent.
I imagine that there would be alternatives for people who assess fines and cannot pay. I also assume there would be some floor that operates as a base fine.
I haven’t. But I’m not a lawmaker. In Finland the police can access the driver’s current net income to assess the fine.
I would suppose they are assessed based on the family’s income.
You still misunderstand. I’m not suggesting they look for how much is left.
I’m suggesting that they apply the fine as a portion of the person’s income. And that being done, they end up with the same amount left.
I like that you’re happy.
Are you under the impression that I wouldn’t want capital gains to be considered a part of income for this purpose?
Uh, zero areas?
You haven’t managed a single cogent point in this thread as far as I’ve seen.
It’s a very simple way to judge how much money you make.
Another nonsense objection.
I smell you handwaving away objections and trying to create needless emotional distractions.
You haven’t demonstrated what you claim.
Good, I guess.
I’ll let the peanut gallery decide which of us is fountaining nonsense like the Bellagio.
Yes, that statement is true. Problem here is that you then try to draw two conclusions from this:
That a person with more income has more money than a person with less income
That a person with more income feels less pain from the loss of that money than a person with less income
Neither of those statements are true. You want then and need them to be true, but they aren’t. We’ve demonstrated pretty clearly that they aren’t true.
The rest of your proposal is based on those two flawed assumptions. But that didn’t stop you from putting on your jump suit and declaring mission accomplished.
Again, when that woman is caught doing 15 over the speed limit, how much do you propose we fine her?
(bolding mine)
But based on the *simple god damn logic *in this thread, as income goes down the pain felt by a given fine goes up. What happens when you approach the bottom of that curve? What are you going to do when any non-zero fine means a child goes hungry, with the power off, and no medication?!?!
Like with caning as a punishment, there will be a segment of the population that will suffer insurmountable pain at even the slightest nudge. Either you apply the lowest level of caning you can, which will still hurt disproportionately to any grandmother you beat. Or you don’t apply a punishment.
So what do you do about the woman in your example? What punishment can you apply that won’t be disproportionate?
Sure, assuming that everyone is punished equally by losing the same proportion of their income is only an approximation. There will undoubtedly be exceptions. But it’s a heck of a better approximation than assuming that everyone is punished equally by losing the same number of dollars. Any argument against proportional fines on the grounds of fairness is also an even better argument against non-proportional fines.
Losing the same number of dollars causes loss of the same amount of stuff. As already demonstrated by multiple examples on this thread, the punitive effect of losing a given amount of stuff depends on eleventy zillion (give or take a few thousand) variables. Hence, the best public policy can do is to use fines in a purely compensatory, rather than punitive, function.
Wow, interestingly abstract conversation about absolute justice, so different from everyday mundane practices of ticketing in Finland.
Excessive over-speeding is charged based on income. The idea is, indeed, that some rich people have fast cars and wreck havoc in the highways. Charging them extra for large or repeated offenses is at least some deterrent. The police pay comes from public funding and does not depend on how much in fines they write every day. For small offenses, there is a simple uniform ticket for everybody.
This system is as old as I can remember. At that time, nobody talked about points. The point system seems very efficient in avoiding repeated offenses, my TAG is that it is better.
Thats the way it works, to some extent. Its based on income rather than wealth (so killing some really rich heir who didn’t produce anything and wasn’t necessary to supporting his family should produce no greater a judgment in trial than a really poor person but an investment banker had a lot of productive years ahead of him.
I think it’s worth noting the the first two cites were in Switzerland - not Sweden, as someone else said in a disparaging manner as if to indicate that there were no difference between the countries. There are huge differences. Switzerland is not even part of the EU. It was neutral in WW2, it didn’t sign the Human Rights Act, it rarely does anything its neighbours do. Its parliamentary system is like something from a fantasy novel. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just demonstrative of how different Switzerland is to the rest of Europe.
It is also a tax haven and home to a lot more wealthy people than most countries, including many who moved there because it’s a tax haven, plus their kids who’ve grown up ultra-rich and untouchable; the country therefore has a lot more reason than most to try to discourage people from speeding by levying fines that actually hit the driver because they have many more people than usual whose income is such that a fine of a few hundred Euros would be laughed off.
For them the bureaucracy involved in fining higher earners is worth it because, once they have the structures in place to check out the drivers’ incomes, they have more rich drivers to assess than most countries do. Also in Switzerland bureaucracy = happy times.
It’s not ‘Europe,’ but Switzerland and one much smaller example from Germany.
I’m all for the idea in general because I think speeding fines should be a deterrent to speeding, with only minor qualms about it due to admin costs. Those aren’t an issue in Switzerland.
I’m also surprised to see people claiming that personal time has equal value. If someone’s working a 45-hour week on an hourly wage, paying someone to look after their kids and finding it hard to do so, and doing all their own housework, then it’s going to be harder for them to take a weekend out to do community service than it is for someone on a regular salary with a nanny they can well afford and a housekeeper.
Would a student from a wealthy family really find it as hard to spend a weekend painting houses as a man supporting a family on two jobs, the second of which is only at weekends?
If anything, personal time would be far harder to judge - the rich person might also volunteer a lot, or the poor person might look after an elderly relative, or the rich person might work 90 hours some weeks but 20 hours others and get told to do their service in the 90-hour week, or the distance to the place for community service might be a lot more (in money and time) for either.
And TBH, if there’s work that needs to be done then I’d rather the state said ‘let’s hire people to do this work’ and paid them. We don’t have zero unemployment, and forced, unskilled labour is not going to be very good.
