5 ms·

The idea of fines as a revenue stream has never sat well with me. Fines are meant to be a disincentive. The ideal collection amount is zero. Treating them as

by mulmen 1y ago

The idea of fines as a revenue stream has never sat well with me. Fines are meant to be a disincentive. The ideal collection amount is zero. Treating them as a revenue stream creates a perverse incentive to enforce the penalty without disincentivizing the behavior.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
tutorialmanager 1y ago
Just like police departments use asset forfeiture to get money to buy their “toys” while innocent people lose their cash and cars because carrying cash is suspicious.
anamexis 1y ago
I think the problem is: 1. How else would you penalize businesses? 2. What else would you do with fines? If fines exist, it would seem foolish not to budget around that.
- watercolorblind 1y ago
  Maybe a uniform tax credit/refund for each citizen that is covered by that level of government. We the citizens can then decide if we fix the issue or continue to generate fines, but at least the budget isn't expecting revenue that could disappear (like the lack of traffic tickets during the beginning of COVID).
- j_w 1y ago
  Governments should not operate fiscally like corporations. A financial institution will budget around fees because it's in their benefit for their customers to incur fees. A government should not budget around fines because they want the behavior which was fined to not occur at all.
  - thayne 1y ago
    I think one way to prevent bad incentives is to ensure that the organizational units that create and enforce policies are not the ones that benefit from any fines collected.
    - j_w 1y ago
      On the surface this sounds great, but governmental organizational units are still able to pressure one another, or have third parties apply pressure.
- craigdalton 1y ago
  How about fines go into a sovereign wealth fund (but not be seen as major source for the fund- more a bonus) so there is no short term budget planning based on fine revenue.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
OptionOfT 1y ago
This is literally what happened in Belgium when politicians did budget. A piece of the expected slice was traffic fines. So that means that any kind of system that would improve traffic other than repressive measures would cost them twice, once to fix the situation and again when they can issue less fines.
- dmos62 1y ago
  If I drive carelessly and get a meaningful fine, I'll think twice next time, irrespective of who gets the money. I only care that I am fined. Unless the police starts to administer fines when they shouldn't, all is good, right? What happened in Belgium?
  - kergonath 1y ago
    I don’t know about Belgium specifically, but one of the usual issues is that it incentivises aggressive policing of minor issues that make money (like parking violations), which takes resources out of other problems (like mugging).
    - lazide 1y ago
      In some situations (cough random towns with sections of highway running through them in Texas), it incentivizes an approach to traffic enforcement which is barely distinguishable from getting mugged.
      - FridgeSeal 1y ago
        Putting the highway, into highway robbery!
  - Timwi 1y ago
    Driving carefully is not a boolean. It's possible to design roads/environments (accidentally or not) in such a way that the “you drove carelessly” metric that triggers the fine statistically applies more often.
  - 1y ago
mcmcmc 1y ago
If your ideal is a perfect society where everyone follows the all rules all the time you are going to be sorely disappointed. The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. And that revenue should be strictly used for rehabilitative or restorative justice. For example, speeding fines should go to road improvements that deter speeding making roads safer. If no one’s speeding, there’s no need for that. But people will always break the law.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Yes I agree. I was replying to the suggestion to put the proceeds from fines into a general slush fund. Doing that creates an incentive to use speeding tickets to pay for police overtime and radar guns instead of traffic calming infrastructure.
- deepsun 1y ago
  The safest road is the closed one. I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.
- bscphil 1y ago
  > The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed. So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement. Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.
- 1y ago
archi42 1y ago
> The ideal collection amount is zero. I agree with the overal position. Though I believe optimizing to collect zero fines is a bad measure. A fine can be a relatively just mechanism to show that actions have consequences. And even the best people will occasionally make honest mistakes, so they will just get a fine instead of being persecuted for minor offences. If fines degrade to a revenue stream, it's an indication something else is off with the financial structure inside the government. At least around here fines don't go into some official's private accounts, but I can see how they might "help" an underfunded department. Thinking about it this way, maybe we should consider funneling fines into a separate pool of money. Though I am not sure what to do when the fines are used to fix damage caused by the action (e.g. ecological damage). Governing is hard :(

by mulmen 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

tutorialmanager 1y ago

Just like police departments use asset forfeiture to get money to buy their “toys” while innocent people lose their cash and cars because carrying cash is suspicious.

anamexis 1y ago

I think the problem is: 1. How else would you penalize businesses? 2. What else would you do with fines? If fines exist, it would seem foolish not to budget around that.

watercolorblind 1y ago
Maybe a uniform tax credit/refund for each citizen that is covered by that level of government. We the citizens can then decide if we fix the issue or continue to generate fines, but at least the budget isn't expecting revenue that could disappear (like the lack of traffic tickets during the beginning of COVID).
j_w 1y ago
Governments should not operate fiscally like corporations. A financial institution will budget around fees because it's in their benefit for their customers to incur fees. A government should not budget around fines because they want the behavior which was fined to not occur at all.
- thayne 1y ago
  I think one way to prevent bad incentives is to ensure that the organizational units that create and enforce policies are not the ones that benefit from any fines collected.
  - j_w 1y ago
    On the surface this sounds great, but governmental organizational units are still able to pressure one another, or have third parties apply pressure.
craigdalton 1y ago
How about fines go into a sovereign wealth fund (but not be seen as major source for the fund- more a bonus) so there is no short term budget planning based on fine revenue.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

OptionOfT 1y ago

This is literally what happened in Belgium when politicians did budget. A piece of the expected slice was traffic fines. So that means that any kind of system that would improve traffic other than repressive measures would cost them twice, once to fix the situation and again when they can issue less fines.

dmos62 1y ago
If I drive carelessly and get a meaningful fine, I'll think twice next time, irrespective of who gets the money. I only care that I am fined. Unless the police starts to administer fines when they shouldn't, all is good, right? What happened in Belgium?
- kergonath 1y ago
  I don’t know about Belgium specifically, but one of the usual issues is that it incentivises aggressive policing of minor issues that make money (like parking violations), which takes resources out of other problems (like mugging).
  - lazide 1y ago
    In some situations (cough random towns with sections of highway running through them in Texas), it incentivizes an approach to traffic enforcement which is barely distinguishable from getting mugged.
    - FridgeSeal 1y ago
      Putting the highway, into highway robbery!
- Timwi 1y ago
  Driving carefully is not a boolean. It's possible to design roads/environments (accidentally or not) in such a way that the “you drove carelessly” metric that triggers the fine statistically applies more often.
- 1y ago

mcmcmc 1y ago

If your ideal is a perfect society where everyone follows the all rules all the time you are going to be sorely disappointed. The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. And that revenue should be strictly used for rehabilitative or restorative justice. For example, speeding fines should go to road improvements that deter speeding making roads safer. If no one’s speeding, there’s no need for that. But people will always break the law.

mulmen 1y ago
Yes I agree. I was replying to the suggestion to put the proceeds from fines into a general slush fund. Doing that creates an incentive to use speeding tickets to pay for police overtime and radar guns instead of traffic calming infrastructure.
deepsun 1y ago
The safest road is the closed one. I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.
bscphil 1y ago
> The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed. So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement. Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.
1y ago

archi42 1y ago

> The ideal collection amount is zero. I agree with the overal position. Though I believe optimizing to collect zero fines is a bad measure. A fine can be a relatively just mechanism to show that actions have consequences. And even the best people will occasionally make honest mistakes, so they will just get a fine instead of being persecuted for minor offences. If fines degrade to a revenue stream, it's an indication something else is off with the financial structure inside the government. At least around here fines don't go into some official's private accounts, but I can see how they might "help" an underfunded department. Thinking about it this way, maybe we should consider funneling fines into a separate pool of money. Though I am not sure what to do when the fines are used to fix damage caused by the action (e.g. ecological damage). Governing is hard :(