3 ms·

Strange. Traffic tickets are one of the best ways to diverge money from the elite to the poor. How can any self proclaimed leftist be against it? There are tons

• Ekaros 4y ago
  And even more if you moved to income based tickets. That is ticket would be fraction of your income. For red light let's say 1 week. Minus some value that is sufficient for poverty level living.
• dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  Because the leftists with a brain have enough space in there to recall that it doesn't work that way in practice and just becomes another avenue for the .gov to screw a few more bucks out of whoever can't fight back. Traffic laws if enforced uniformly would be massively unpopular and get changed. You might be able to get people to bend over and take it like they do in Europe but you'd have to boil the frog for a couple hundred years to get to a state where that's culturally acceptable in the US. Traffic laws enforced discretionarily just become an expensive wheeled version of stop and frisk but with a pretext that makes them constitutional which is not good for society. The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy. Of course there are places where improvement can be made but such opportunity is mostly incremental.
  • ehvatum 4y ago
    > The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy. This allows for oppression via selective enforcement and is absolutely a jackboot fantasy.
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      Which is better than the same thing but with bigger teeth and in more places, which is exactly what happens when you take the jackboot fantasy and try and implement it anywhere other than textbook magic land. The solution to the fact that minor civil infractions are potentially ruinous to the poor and that the cops prowl the neighborhoods of the powerless looking for revenue for the state isn't to implement those things everywhere.
• earthling8118 4y ago
  How do traffic tickets help the poor? They are more useful for punishing the poor significantly while being fairly inconsequential to the rich. They don't scale to your income level.
  • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    The truly poor don't even own a car. They're desperately trying to cross the street before getting run over. They're relying on public transit if it even exists to get anywhere.
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      You know where the truly poor come from? They come from the "slightly better off poor". Creating a potentially ruinous expense that will occasionally be used to occasionally knock people in the latter group down to the former is anything but progressive and probably not good from a societal POV.
      • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
        You can use this argument to justify any form of extant infrastructure that an upper class uses. It's such a broad argument as to be meaningless
        • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
          The difference here is that a great many of all the other classes use the same damn infrastructure.