If a poor person gets a $100 parking fine that can ruin their whole month but if a guy on a million a year gets a $100 fine then that’s the same as no fine at all. I think the richer you are the more you should pay and the poorer you are the less you should pay otherwise the poor person ends up with a much harder punishment for the same thing which isnt fair.
I understand the Germans use that method for their traffic citations. They run a much more civilized country than we do.
That’s a very good article on the application and history of income-based fines. Their constitutionality in the U.S. is the subject of this law review article, which was way too long to read.
The concept is a good one, I think. Laws should be fair, in that they affect people with approximately equal severity. No fine is going to disrupt Bill Gates’ lifestyle, but you can’t base a system on how the richest 500 will skate. Getting at the ordinarily rich should do fine.
Would Americans accept this system? Getting Americans to provide personal information is unbelievably hard. How would the courts figure out what to charge? Finland has some sort of database to consult, but nothing like that exists here. More to the point, they base the fine on income. But most people in America think in terms of wealth. Income and wealthy are correlated but separate items. A billionaire may have an actual income in any particular year that’s small. In any case, none of the previous tries have worked out very well.
I’d like to see it, but it’s pretty low priority. Some time in the future when we start making strides toward a fairer and more equal society, this would be more innocuous and we could throw it at the wall to see if it stuck.
It depends on what the goal of the fine is. Is it truly intended to deter unwanted behavior, or is it simply a revenue-generating mechanism?
Lets take parking fines, for example. In many jurisdictions, if you don’t feed the meter, you get a parking ticket. The parking fine is intended to cover the unpaid parking fee plus a penalty for not following the rules. Is it fair for a millionaire to pay a much higher penalty because of their greater wealth? To take an extreme example, how could anyone justify a parking fine of thousands of dollars for failing to put a quarter in the parking meter?
Also, how do you define wealth? A recently retired person might have a lot of wealth on paper, but knows it has to last the rest of their lives. Is it fair to penalize them with a astronomical parking fine because they saved up for retirement?
Back to my initial comment regarding deterrence versus revenue generation—here’s a recent personal anecdote: I’m a utility engineer. I had to go out to a construction site a couple of weeks ago to talk to a resident about a complaint (about the construction). The street was full of construction equipment, the road was torn up, and it was closed to through traffic. While talking to the resident I got a parking ticket because on-street parking was prohibited on Wednesdays for street sweeping. It wasn’t physically possible to get a street sweeper in there if they wanted to, plus we had permits from the city allowing us to be there. Why on Earth would a parking enforcement officer possibly think it was a good idea to hand out parking tickets on a street like this? What was the goal here? To prevent me from doing my job? I’ll add that there was quite literally nowhere else to park, as these signs were up all over the neighborhood.
The lack of most places failing to implement income-based civil fines to me is evidence that the people making the most money are in charge of setting the fine schedule, and that those people anticipate that they one day will be on the receiving end.
What’s next? Y’all gonna advocate that the rich be punished more for sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread?
I would set fines differently for failing to feed a meter, which is a marked parking spot, and for parking where there is no parking and/or on the crosswalk, etc.
From the below article, it appears that there was systematic disruption for the neighbors and pedestrians. The fines were a minor part of doing business. However for someone such as Jeff Bezos, the I’m not sure the fine can be made big enough to cause him any discomfort. And the fines would anyway be on the construction company, who certainly does not have the same deep pockets.
I think there’s a case to be made. If the point of fines is deterrence, then those with higher incomes/wealth should have the fines set at greater levels.
The problem is how to execute such a system. How about an older person with no real net income but who owns a property that, due to increase in value and inflation, is now worth $2.3m?
Or a self-employed landscaper who only declares a fraction of his income (to avoid child support payments for example) so that despite earning $500k+ per year, only declares $25k to the tax-man?
As I said, great in theory, not so good in practice.
Not for traffic citations, and based on income, not on wealth. To provide some background on how German law handles this:
There are two types of fines in German law. The first is a Geldstrafe, a fine as a punishment for criminal offences, imposed by a court sentence after conviction in a due criminal trial. The second is a Bußgeld, which is an administrative sanction imposed by an administrative authority (which can include a police officer) within that authority’s own powers. If you disagree with that sanction you can contest it in court, but the initial imposition of the fine is done by the authority.
Traffic citations are lesser offences, and thus fall under the second scheme described above. There is some discretion for the authority in setting the amount of the fine, but for everyday minor traffic offences they follow a pretty standardised approach and don’t really bother to investigate the infractor’s wealth. So a standard parking ticket will not be based on how wealthy the person who parked is.
As for the more serious criminal punishment fines, German law provides that the court needs to define the amount of the fine not in terms of euros but in terms of day units (Tagessatz in German). The more severe the crime, the higher the number of day units imposed as a fine. Conceptually, a day unit is defined as net income per day (although it is subject to floors and caps). After setting the number of day units, that number is multiplied by the infractor’s daily net income to arrive at the pecuniary amount of the fine.
Income-based fines are also in use in Finland, Sweden and Denmark, and it works just fine. Of course there are rare loopholees, like an heiress with no income and vast wealth, but 99 % or so of people work for a living, or receive state benefits, and can be fined according to their realistic capacity.
With no income-based adjustment, affluent people could do whatever they feel like, so hooray for the Scandi / German system!
Great post overall. This snip is especially poignant & relevant.
To the degree any level of government has turned into a cynical extortion racket, they’ve lost the right to claim any sort of moral high ground or even base legitimacy for their actions. The classic cases are of course the small towns near interstates. Another ghastly example was some of the municipalities made famous by the Ferguson MO racial violence a few years ago, where the local populace was simply a captive group to be fleeced at random by predatory false policing and equally predatory false sentencing and fining.
When scum are running the government, we get a scummy government. Can’t have that and still run a successful just society.
Maybe everything should be based on wealth.
Need a loaf of bread? Income over $100k? That will be $20 please.
Jug of milk? Income under $25k. $0.50 please.
Even everything out, so there is no incentive to earn more money than the next guy…
I would recommend against such a thing.
There is a difference between buying a loaf of bread and breaking the law. The former should not be disincentivized, the latter should.
It is not a matter of evening things out so that there is no incentive to earn more, but to adjust penalties so that the wealthy have as much incentive to follow the law as the poor.
Your suggestion is already largely implemented, but not at quite the scale you advocate. There are subsidies for those who cannot afford milk or bread, to bring the price to something they can attain from the government, and many businesses also use a multi-tier pricing model, where if you time is not worth as much, you can save money by collecting and turning in coupons, allowing them to sell the same product at different prices to people with different incomes.
However, the idea that you have proposed here, of making it some sort of mandate from the government to create different price points for consumers, would be very poorly implemented and and even more poorly received. I would suggest you rethink your motives for putting forth such a proposal, as I don’t think that anyone would take it seriously.
The incentive to earn more income should not be based on the incentive to ameliorate the punishments for violating the law.
Folks, icantdraw is not making a serious proposal. They’re trying to make a reductio ad absurdum argument against the OP’s proposal. However this sort of argument is only valid if it doesn’t ignore relevant facts about the proposal to be reduced.
There is another aspect to this, that you want to limit the illegal parking, but can accept some illegal parking. Having a flat fee for it will tend to accomplish the goal. The inequality of it is that poor people will try to avoid it while the rich will consider it a parking fee, but the goal accomplished.
And I do think that’s a big part of it, We will have parking violations, we will have speeding, we will have runners of red lights, etc. We just want to get those numbers down to acceptable numbers, but not eliminate it, and we want to do it is the quietest way. As such there is no reason for charging more based on income as the flat fee reduces it enough not to be a problem.
Chipping in another story from the perspective of German law. As pointed out in my earlier post, minor traffic offences carry a fine in Germany that is not normally calibrated for income or wealth. In addition, in international comparison, German traffic fines are quite low - with moderate amounts of speeding or parking infractions, you’re likely to get away with a fine in the region of €20. This has led to cases where people would park their car in a no-parking area on a regular basis - in major cities, the fines would be not much more than what you’d pay for legal parking. So there were people who would do this every day, happily pay their fine every day, and regard it as a kind of parking fee. Until, one day, their licence was suspended. Courts have upheld such suspensions, arguing that a persistent and systemic unwillingness to comply with traffic regulations means you shouldn’t be trusted to drive a car in the first place.
These are extreme cases and they’re not very numerous, but it shows that even for the wealthy, there are disincentives other than fines that can be utilised.
Picking the above quote apart a bit you said it’s not a problem if the voiceless are harmed and the privileged are benefited since after all, we’ll never hear the voices of the voiceless.
IMO that’s a shitty way to run a government. Even if the topic is something as trivial as parking.
The wealthy are above the law?
Can’t say I agree with that perspective. If laws only apply to poor people, then that’s just oppression.
No not exactly, I’m saying it’s not a problem if only a limited number of people do it, but becomes a problem if more people do. So since the goal is to prevent problems, and not restrict actions (as restricting a action that does not present a problem is immoral), a method to reduce such actions to ‘no problem’ level is as far as morality can support.