10 ms·

It should be like in Finland where fines are tied to your income. Poor people get small fines, rich people get big fines. That is the most logical as a fine is

It should be like in Finland where fines are tied to your income. Poor people get small fines, rich people get big fines. That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. It is also supposed to be a fairly mild punishment so if it is always so high that you can’t pay but have to go to prison then you are suddenly handing out very severe punishment for minor infractions.

humanrebar 8y ago
There is actually a constitutional right to be free of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the U.S. Judges just have to start ruling that $250 is cruel when someone is in poverty. There is also a right to a "fair and speedy trial". Judges just have to start ruling that sitting in county jail for six months waiting for trial is unconstitutional.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
  It has to be cruel and unusual. Fines may or may not be cruel but they're definitely not unusual.
  - praptak 8y ago
    Fines in general aren't. Fines so big that the individual cannot realistically pay them are up for discussion, IMHO. I admit there's a Catch 22 logic here though. Once a punishment starts being handed so often that it becomes a problem for society, it becomes "usual".
- pixl97 8y ago
  Most of the time it is not the judge that delays the trial, but the lawyers. The first hearing is generally in a few days.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Ok, so for the latter do you then just release people? You can't fix a judicial system by mere declaration.
  - pc86 8y ago
    If you accept for the sake of argument that a six month jail sentence waiting for trial is a violation of your Constitutional right to a speedy trial (it's not[0], particularly if you're waiving a jury trial and are being tried by a judge), the person whose rights were violated would need to sue and appeal on those grounds. It's very unlikely that on day 121 the judge dismisses the case, but they're certainly free to do that if they feel it was a violation. [0] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/right-to-a-speedy-trial-in-criminal-cases.html https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/right-to-a-sp...
    - humanrebar 8y ago
      I'm not sure it would be unlikely given the narratives of the article. At least it shouldn't be. Judges exist, partly, to prevent Kafkaesque application of rules from causing injustice.
  - beat 8y ago
    Well, look at the alternative. Under the current system, besides the destructiveness of incarcerating often innocent people for months for trivial charges, you wind up with people pleading guilty to crimes they never committed, just to avoid being locked up for months. A basic principle of common law and the American justice system is that it's better to free the guilty than imprison the innocent. So just on American principles, letting poor people go on the assumption that they'll return for trial is better than keeping them in jail for lack of bail.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      This is a misrepresentation of the legal system in the US. There's an immense amount of information on this topic available from the Bureaeu of Justice Statistics. This [1] paper in particular is highly relevant. Bail tends to be set in relation to the criminal record of an individual, the seriousness of an offense, how much of a flight risk they are, and whether or not they're likely to be a danger to themselves or others if released. It's not the 'norm'. So for instance of all individuals (arrested for any offense) 77% of those with no priors end up being released without financial condition. For those with misdemeanor priors it's 63% and 46% for those with felony priors. And there are excellent test cases that can experimentally show whether these release conditions are reasonable. For instance there are occasional emergency releases caused by things such as prison overcrowding. And this is where people that would not normally be released without condition, are. Of these individuals 52% end up being charged with pretrial misconduct! For the general population of people intentionally released that figure ranges from 27%-36% depending on the release type. And when somebody is forced to pay bail, they have numerous options. Generally they only have to pay 10% of the cost of the bail. In some cases that can be paid directly to the court who will then refund that 10% once they return for and complete their trial. If that's not an option the way bail bondsmen work is that an individual pays the bail bondsmen 10%. The bail bondsmen then go to the court and pay 100% of the bail on behalf of the individual. They get that 100% back once the individual returns and completes their trial, so the 10% is their profit margin. This is also where modern day 'bounting hunting' tends to come into play -- the bail bondsmen have a very strong incentive to ensure that their clients do not flee. --- So the point of this all is that in the vast majority of cases we do simply let people go on the assumption they'll return to trial. For those that we don't let go, there tends to be a pretty good reason. That article from the BJS I linked has a great table at the bottom that offers some regression figures for release/return rates of various groups helping to determine how justified various decisions are. In most cases they are, in some cases they are not. It's pretty reasonable to conclude that it's a system that does well, but could be made to do better. But it's quite different from what you would portray it as. [1] - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf
- pc86 8y ago
  SCOTUS has already ruled that the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment - more specifically, that since it is not unusual, it is not a Constitutional violation despite where you feel it falls on the cruelty spectrum. A common pleas or even circuit court judge can't simply say "lol whatever I'm going to ignore that." Only SCOTUS can reverse its position on the Constitutionality of the death penalty.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    But SCOTUS can only reverse what is brought to it, right ? So a circuit court judge has to ignore that so that SCOTUS can have the occasion to reverse its position ? Bear with me, I am not from the US.
    - psudo 8y ago
      That's not quite how it works. The lower court would be expected to uphold SCOTUS's rulings, though there is some wiggle room. The main way things get before SCOTUS is through the parties appealing the lower court decisions and then SCOTUS deciding to hear it.
  - iamthirsty 8y ago
    A lower level court judge can make a ruling, like finding a $250 fine for a poor person cruel, that stands, because it's not a SCOTUS issue. The death penatly sure, and the legality of it has already been decided in the U.S., and is usually for serious crimes. But for low-level offenses, the likes of which are rarely — or basically never — brought before SCOTUS or higher level courts, a judge can rule in any way he sees fair, as that's his job.
  - dmm 8y ago
    SCOTUS has ruled that the death penalty _is_ cruel and unusual punishment in many circumstances. For example, in 1980 they ruled that it could only be applied only if it involves a precise and aggravating factor[0]. Louisiana had a law that made the rape of a child punishable by death and SCOTUS overturned that law in 2008[1]. SCOTUS has consistent narrowed the crimes punishable by death in the past 50 years using the Eighth Amendment as a justification. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Supreme_Court_narrows_capital_offenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 8y ago
This is a great idea. Is it actually written in terms of percent of income, or is it a specific sliding scale for every infraction?
- Nib9fith 8y ago
  Most countries in western europe have a concept of day-fines. It's averaged income minus essential expenses multiplied by some amount of time. Fictional example: speeding 20km/h above the limit gets 30 day-fines. So they'll calculate how much you'd earn in 30 days, subtract essentials and that's your fine.
  - bo1024 8y ago
    This could be a problem in the US because of how "income" is measured and reported by the rich (among many reasons).
    - Nib9fith 8y ago
      It would still help the poorest. Figuring out how to define income for the upper end could be done separately.
expertentipp 8y ago
People tend to romanticize European Nordic countries and their cute pragmatic solutions of certain problems. Some numbers for scale - population 5.5mln, Finnish and Swedish population in the country >94%.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Isn't that just an argument for doing it at a State by State level? Also, why describe something as "cute" and "pragmatic" - you prefer "ugly" and "impractical"?
- gattilorenz 8y ago
  Yeah, that's always repeated over and over whenever someone points at the nordic countries. But how, in this specific case, does larger population size impact the implementation of income-tied fines? Edit, further specification: doesn't the US, at least on a state by state fashion, have some kind of standard declaration /way of determining your income?
  - tux1968 8y ago
    Well, instead of just slapping on the fine amount, you must now have a process to determine the person's income for each and every ticket. The scale of that process would be much bigger in the USA.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gattilorenz 8y ago
      Yeah, sure. But do you think this is an unbearable problem, and it will make the whole thing impractical, and the benefits are not enough?
      - tux1968 8y ago
        Personally I really like the idea, but it might be a very expensive proposition to implement. Edit: And could have unintended consequences for the court system, and create unintended incentives to ticket higher income people more vigorously than lower income (potentially creating unenforced laws in lower income areas).
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
So now that I've "made it" I can get screwed back to square one because I rolled a stop sign at 1am and the cop doesn't like my attitude during the following game of 20 questions they always want to play when they're fishing. Screw that. Edit: I would be less not ok with fines that scaled by income if they were reasonable for the infraction. Fines in the US are not reasonable (with a few state by state exceptions) unless you're upper middle class. If we scaled fines in the US so everyone got screwed as hard as poor people get screwed that would be very, very bad. If we were to scale fines by income then the middle or upper middle should be the point where there's not much difference (i.e. those people pay the same under the current system and some hypothetical income based system) because that's the point you need to be at for fines to be roughly proportional to the offense. I have zero faith that that could be implemented. What would likely happen is that the poor would still get screwed and everyone else would get just as screwed which is worse than the current situation.
- gattilorenz 8y ago
  Are you implying that having "made it" grants you the right of "rolling a stop sign at 1 am"? If not, I don't see how this would be a problem. If your income is X times higher than mine, you will be fined X times more. Given your income, you can afford it, but it is still a deterrent (I, on the other hand, would go back to square "minus one" if I had to pay the same amount as you).
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >If not, I don't see how this would be a problem. If your income is X times higher than mine, you will be fined X times more. Given your income, you can afford it, but it is still a deterrent (I, on the other hand, would go back to square "minus one" if I had to pay the same amount as you). The way this is likely to work in reality if that you go to square minus one if you get fined and I go to square minus one if I get fined. So we've gained nothing except screwing more people and making the state more dependent on revenue from fines. Fines never go down, only up. An income based system would mean we all get screwed. I have no problem with income based fines on paper. I have zero faith in their ability to be used properly in the US. Better to just lower fines across the board. It's not like the threat of a fine is what's keeping the vast majority of people from driving at triple digit speeds or littering.
Aunche 8y ago
I think it would be a good idea to reduce the fines of those in or close to poverty and subsidize that by increasing fines for the wealthy. That said, what Finland is doing is ridiculous. A fine for speeding shouldn't cost several times the cost of an accident. It also gives police the wrong incentives. Why bother pulling over a beater car when they aren't going pay a fine? Might as well tailgate a Rolls Royce and cite them when they inevitably make a minor infraction.
- aljones 8y ago
  Police shouldn't have incentives to increase revenue.
  - throwanem 8y ago
    How do you feel about paying higher taxes?
    - aljones 8y ago
      There are more important things than money.
      - throwanem 8y ago
        Good answer.
- mikeash 8y ago
  > A fine for speeding shouldn't cost several times the cost of an accident. Why not, assuming that laws against speeding exist for public safety? (That's a dubious assumption, but if it's untrue then the speed limits need to be changed until it is.) The cost of an accident can end up being lives, not just money, so it's hard to talk about "the cost of an accident." Even if you take a hard-nosed economically rational position and assign a monetary value to each life, the typical value is something like $10 million. The point of these fines is to deter the behavior. If you put a cap on the amount of the fine, then sufficiently wealthy people are no longer deterred. You're essentially making it so that they can break this law with impunity because they're rich. As for giving the police the wrong incentives, if they have any incentives related to the amount of money they bring in through fines, they already have the wrong incentives. Money from traffic tickets should never end up anywhere near the police budget.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. That is why that system doesn't work. For most things the required amount of deterrent doesn't depend on your income. For example, if it costs $100 to dispose of motor oil properly but $0 to dump it in the sewer then the fine has to be at least $100. But that means it needs to be at least $100 for everybody, or there will be people who find it profitable -- even to the point of setting up a "motor oil disposal" company where they dump everyone's motor oil in the sewer and then just pay the fines. But if you set the amount high enough that it deters the lowest income person and then scale it with income, you end up with unnecessarily draconian penalties on ordinary people. It also becomes an obvious arbitrage opportunity. For example, if a rich person wants to travel fast by car then they get a low-income chauffeur so that the speeding fine is less. Income-based systems are always susceptible to this, where the super rich pay the cost of doing the arbitrage and what the system really ends up doing is hammering the middle class because they can't justify the arbitrage so they end up paying higher rates than the rich. See also corporate income tax, paid by local businesses but not huge international ones. Finland only gets away with it because they have much less income inequality, and in particular much less poverty, so the ratio typically doesn't scale to the point that it starts causing huge problems like this.
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  This is not an insurmountable hurdle. For people too poor to afford even the lowest fine, you can do something like community service at an effective pay rate of minimum wage in lieu of the fine. In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > For people too poor to afford even the lowest fine, you can do something like community service at an effective pay rate of minimum wage in lieu of the fine. The problem is the opposite of that -- it isn't that the fine on low income people is too high, it's that it's too low to be a deterrent unless you make it high enough that scaling it makes is unnecessarily harsh for middle class people. > In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes. At which point you might as well just disband all large enterprises immediately because you've set up a system where you multiply the base rate of misbehavior by both the number of employees and the company's total revenue, which are both just proxies for size and so the penalty isn't just proportional, it's N-squared. You also can't avoid the problem unless you go all the way to the root of ownership or people will just outsource the activity to a shell company, but then you end up imposing a billion dollar fine for littering because the offender works for a company which is owned by a mutual fund.
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
Should the same be done with time based fines (prison sentences)?

humanrebar 8y ago

There is actually a constitutional right to be free of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the U.S. Judges just have to start ruling that $250 is cruel when someone is in poverty. There is also a right to a "fair and speedy trial". Judges just have to start ruling that sitting in county jail for six months waiting for trial is unconstitutional.

frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
It has to be cruel and unusual. Fines may or may not be cruel but they're definitely not unusual.
- praptak 8y ago
  Fines in general aren't. Fines so big that the individual cannot realistically pay them are up for discussion, IMHO. I admit there's a Catch 22 logic here though. Once a punishment starts being handed so often that it becomes a problem for society, it becomes "usual".
pixl97 8y ago
Most of the time it is not the judge that delays the trial, but the lawyers. The first hearing is generally in a few days.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Ok, so for the latter do you then just release people? You can't fix a judicial system by mere declaration.
- pc86 8y ago
  If you accept for the sake of argument that a six month jail sentence waiting for trial is a violation of your Constitutional right to a speedy trial (it's not[0], particularly if you're waiving a jury trial and are being tried by a judge), the person whose rights were violated would need to sue and appeal on those grounds. It's very unlikely that on day 121 the judge dismisses the case, but they're certainly free to do that if they feel it was a violation. [0] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/right-to-a-speedy-trial-in-criminal-cases.html https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/right-to-a-sp...
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    I'm not sure it would be unlikely given the narratives of the article. At least it shouldn't be. Judges exist, partly, to prevent Kafkaesque application of rules from causing injustice.
- beat 8y ago
  Well, look at the alternative. Under the current system, besides the destructiveness of incarcerating often innocent people for months for trivial charges, you wind up with people pleading guilty to crimes they never committed, just to avoid being locked up for months. A basic principle of common law and the American justice system is that it's better to free the guilty than imprison the innocent. So just on American principles, letting poor people go on the assumption that they'll return for trial is better than keeping them in jail for lack of bail.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    This is a misrepresentation of the legal system in the US. There's an immense amount of information on this topic available from the Bureaeu of Justice Statistics. This [1] paper in particular is highly relevant. Bail tends to be set in relation to the criminal record of an individual, the seriousness of an offense, how much of a flight risk they are, and whether or not they're likely to be a danger to themselves or others if released. It's not the 'norm'. So for instance of all individuals (arrested for any offense) 77% of those with no priors end up being released without financial condition. For those with misdemeanor priors it's 63% and 46% for those with felony priors. And there are excellent test cases that can experimentally show whether these release conditions are reasonable. For instance there are occasional emergency releases caused by things such as prison overcrowding. And this is where people that would not normally be released without condition, are. Of these individuals 52% end up being charged with pretrial misconduct! For the general population of people intentionally released that figure ranges from 27%-36% depending on the release type. And when somebody is forced to pay bail, they have numerous options. Generally they only have to pay 10% of the cost of the bail. In some cases that can be paid directly to the court who will then refund that 10% once they return for and complete their trial. If that's not an option the way bail bondsmen work is that an individual pays the bail bondsmen 10%. The bail bondsmen then go to the court and pay 100% of the bail on behalf of the individual. They get that 100% back once the individual returns and completes their trial, so the 10% is their profit margin. This is also where modern day 'bounting hunting' tends to come into play -- the bail bondsmen have a very strong incentive to ensure that their clients do not flee. --- So the point of this all is that in the vast majority of cases we do simply let people go on the assumption they'll return to trial. For those that we don't let go, there tends to be a pretty good reason. That article from the BJS I linked has a great table at the bottom that offers some regression figures for release/return rates of various groups helping to determine how justified various decisions are. In most cases they are, in some cases they are not. It's pretty reasonable to conclude that it's a system that does well, but could be made to do better. But it's quite different from what you would portray it as. [1] - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf
pc86 8y ago
SCOTUS has already ruled that the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment - more specifically, that since it is not unusual, it is not a Constitutional violation despite where you feel it falls on the cruelty spectrum. A common pleas or even circuit court judge can't simply say "lol whatever I'm going to ignore that." Only SCOTUS can reverse its position on the Constitutionality of the death penalty.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  But SCOTUS can only reverse what is brought to it, right ? So a circuit court judge has to ignore that so that SCOTUS can have the occasion to reverse its position ? Bear with me, I am not from the US.
  - psudo 8y ago
    That's not quite how it works. The lower court would be expected to uphold SCOTUS's rulings, though there is some wiggle room. The main way things get before SCOTUS is through the parties appealing the lower court decisions and then SCOTUS deciding to hear it.
- iamthirsty 8y ago
  A lower level court judge can make a ruling, like finding a $250 fine for a poor person cruel, that stands, because it's not a SCOTUS issue. The death penatly sure, and the legality of it has already been decided in the U.S., and is usually for serious crimes. But for low-level offenses, the likes of which are rarely — or basically never — brought before SCOTUS or higher level courts, a judge can rule in any way he sees fair, as that's his job.
- dmm 8y ago
  SCOTUS has ruled that the death penalty _is_ cruel and unusual punishment in many circumstances. For example, in 1980 they ruled that it could only be applied only if it involves a precise and aggravating factor[0]. Louisiana had a law that made the rape of a child punishable by death and SCOTUS overturned that law in 2008[1]. SCOTUS has consistent narrowed the crimes punishable by death in the past 50 years using the Eighth Amendment as a justification. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Supreme_Court_narrows_capital_offenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nerdponx 8y ago

This is a great idea. Is it actually written in terms of percent of income, or is it a specific sliding scale for every infraction?

Nib9fith 8y ago
Most countries in western europe have a concept of day-fines. It's averaged income minus essential expenses multiplied by some amount of time. Fictional example: speeding 20km/h above the limit gets 30 day-fines. So they'll calculate how much you'd earn in 30 days, subtract essentials and that's your fine.
- bo1024 8y ago
  This could be a problem in the US because of how "income" is measured and reported by the rich (among many reasons).
  - Nib9fith 8y ago
    It would still help the poorest. Figuring out how to define income for the upper end could be done separately.

expertentipp 8y ago

People tend to romanticize European Nordic countries and their cute pragmatic solutions of certain problems. Some numbers for scale - population 5.5mln, Finnish and Swedish population in the country >94%.

arethuza 8y ago
Isn't that just an argument for doing it at a State by State level? Also, why describe something as "cute" and "pragmatic" - you prefer "ugly" and "impractical"?
gattilorenz 8y ago
Yeah, that's always repeated over and over whenever someone points at the nordic countries. But how, in this specific case, does larger population size impact the implementation of income-tied fines? Edit, further specification: doesn't the US, at least on a state by state fashion, have some kind of standard declaration /way of determining your income?
- tux1968 8y ago
  Well, instead of just slapping on the fine amount, you must now have a process to determine the person's income for each and every ticket. The scale of that process would be much bigger in the USA.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gattilorenz 8y ago
    Yeah, sure. But do you think this is an unbearable problem, and it will make the whole thing impractical, and the benefits are not enough?
    - tux1968 8y ago
      Personally I really like the idea, but it might be a very expensive proposition to implement. Edit: And could have unintended consequences for the court system, and create unintended incentives to ticket higher income people more vigorously than lower income (potentially creating unenforced laws in lower income areas).

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

So now that I've "made it" I can get screwed back to square one because I rolled a stop sign at 1am and the cop doesn't like my attitude during the following game of 20 questions they always want to play when they're fishing. Screw that. Edit: I would be less not ok with fines that scaled by income if they were reasonable for the infraction. Fines in the US are not reasonable (with a few state by state exceptions) unless you're upper middle class. If we scaled fines in the US so everyone got screwed as hard as poor people get screwed that would be very, very bad. If we were to scale fines by income then the middle or upper middle should be the point where there's not much difference (i.e. those people pay the same under the current system and some hypothetical income based system) because that's the point you need to be at for fines to be roughly proportional to the offense. I have zero faith that that could be implemented. What would likely happen is that the poor would still get screwed and everyone else would get just as screwed which is worse than the current situation.

gattilorenz 8y ago
Are you implying that having "made it" grants you the right of "rolling a stop sign at 1 am"? If not, I don't see how this would be a problem. If your income is X times higher than mine, you will be fined X times more. Given your income, you can afford it, but it is still a deterrent (I, on the other hand, would go back to square "minus one" if I had to pay the same amount as you).
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >If not, I don't see how this would be a problem. If your income is X times higher than mine, you will be fined X times more. Given your income, you can afford it, but it is still a deterrent (I, on the other hand, would go back to square "minus one" if I had to pay the same amount as you). The way this is likely to work in reality if that you go to square minus one if you get fined and I go to square minus one if I get fined. So we've gained nothing except screwing more people and making the state more dependent on revenue from fines. Fines never go down, only up. An income based system would mean we all get screwed. I have no problem with income based fines on paper. I have zero faith in their ability to be used properly in the US. Better to just lower fines across the board. It's not like the threat of a fine is what's keeping the vast majority of people from driving at triple digit speeds or littering.

Aunche 8y ago

I think it would be a good idea to reduce the fines of those in or close to poverty and subsidize that by increasing fines for the wealthy. That said, what Finland is doing is ridiculous. A fine for speeding shouldn't cost several times the cost of an accident. It also gives police the wrong incentives. Why bother pulling over a beater car when they aren't going pay a fine? Might as well tailgate a Rolls Royce and cite them when they inevitably make a minor infraction.

aljones 8y ago
Police shouldn't have incentives to increase revenue.
- throwanem 8y ago
  How do you feel about paying higher taxes?
  - aljones 8y ago
    There are more important things than money.
    - throwanem 8y ago
      Good answer.
mikeash 8y ago
> A fine for speeding shouldn't cost several times the cost of an accident. Why not, assuming that laws against speeding exist for public safety? (That's a dubious assumption, but if it's untrue then the speed limits need to be changed until it is.) The cost of an accident can end up being lives, not just money, so it's hard to talk about "the cost of an accident." Even if you take a hard-nosed economically rational position and assign a monetary value to each life, the typical value is something like $10 million. The point of these fines is to deter the behavior. If you put a cap on the amount of the fine, then sufficiently wealthy people are no longer deterred. You're essentially making it so that they can break this law with impunity because they're rich. As for giving the police the wrong incentives, if they have any incentives related to the amount of money they bring in through fines, they already have the wrong incentives. Money from traffic tickets should never end up anywhere near the police budget.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. That is why that system doesn't work. For most things the required amount of deterrent doesn't depend on your income. For example, if it costs $100 to dispose of motor oil properly but $0 to dump it in the sewer then the fine has to be at least $100. But that means it needs to be at least $100 for everybody, or there will be people who find it profitable -- even to the point of setting up a "motor oil disposal" company where they dump everyone's motor oil in the sewer and then just pay the fines. But if you set the amount high enough that it deters the lowest income person and then scale it with income, you end up with unnecessarily draconian penalties on ordinary people. It also becomes an obvious arbitrage opportunity. For example, if a rich person wants to travel fast by car then they get a low-income chauffeur so that the speeding fine is less. Income-based systems are always susceptible to this, where the super rich pay the cost of doing the arbitrage and what the system really ends up doing is hammering the middle class because they can't justify the arbitrage so they end up paying higher rates than the rich. See also corporate income tax, paid by local businesses but not huge international ones. Finland only gets away with it because they have much less income inequality, and in particular much less poverty, so the ratio typically doesn't scale to the point that it starts causing huge problems like this.

TheCoelacanth 8y ago
This is not an insurmountable hurdle. For people too poor to afford even the lowest fine, you can do something like community service at an effective pay rate of minimum wage in lieu of the fine. In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > For people too poor to afford even the lowest fine, you can do something like community service at an effective pay rate of minimum wage in lieu of the fine. The problem is the opposite of that -- it isn't that the fine on low income people is too high, it's that it's too low to be a deterrent unless you make it high enough that scaling it makes is unnecessarily harsh for middle class people. > In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes. At which point you might as well just disband all large enterprises immediately because you've set up a system where you multiply the base rate of misbehavior by both the number of employees and the company's total revenue, which are both just proxies for size and so the penalty isn't just proportional, it's N-squared. You also can't avoid the problem unless you go all the way to the root of ownership or people will just outsource the activity to a shell company, but then you end up imposing a billion dollar fine for littering because the offender works for a company which is owned by a mutual fund.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

Should the same be done with time based fines (prison sentences)?