3 ms·

it would mitigate it but then you'd get the states pressuring the municipalities to jack up the fines. probably better than the current situation but not a pan

• _delirium 13y ago
  In some cases that would be true. But in a number of cases I think there's a fairly particularized local bad incentive that gets mitigated at the state level via dilution (and also looks worse, if anyone has to look at it). Texas did something like this with traffic fines. Due to extensive abuse of small municipalities who were trying to extract windfall profits from the fact that they happened to be located along an interstate in Middle-of-Nowhere, West Texas, the state did the state version of "nationalizing" to the revenue from traffic tickets: changed the law so all ticket revenue gets sent to Austin. This has mostly solved the problem: these small municipalities no longer have the incentive to ticket a bunch of people. In this case I think it's mostly due to different local vs. state incentives. At the local level, if you happen to live in a 750-person municipality along a freeway, ticketing people aggressively is popular, because it raises money for the municipality, mostly from outsiders passing through. But if Austin takes control of ticketing revenues, it gets much less popular: the average Texan does not want aggressive ticketing on the West Texas interstates.