Simple penalties create classes of crime; wealthy folks just ignore the penalty on double parking some poor schmuck because who cares about a $100 fine when you're making $1M?
These regulations are written to discourage unfair acts or behavior that exploites the social contract. It tells folks that the municipality thinks it's right for less-wealthy people to be burdened with providing comforts for more-wealthy people.
Means-tested fines actually get to the point of it: dissuade all people from doing something dangerous, indefensibly rude, et cetera, and not just poor folks.
If you care primarily about the financial impact of jail, then that would be an argument for the opposite of what you suggest: A rich person is likely to be less affected by the loss of a days income than a poor person, and so if the financial value of the time spent in jail was all that mattered then rich people ought to be imprisoned longer for the same crime, not shorter.
Since the financial impact is not the main consideration of jail time, it shouldn't be major factor.
With respect to children, children whose parents are imprisoned are more at risk of future problems, and so irrespective of other considerations it may well be preferable to society to take it into account.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or if these are genuine questions. I suspect the former, in which case you need to unpack your arguments a bit more.
Incarceration by itself is poorly correlated to the goal of reducing overall crime and reducing recidivism. Putting people in prison should be a last resort, instead of the first resort that the US and some other countries treat it as.
Regarding jail time for the wealthy, you're still thinking in simple numbers instead of means-tested comparisons. A more-wealthy person and a less-wealthy person that go to jail for 30 days both are physically restricted for 8% of a year. If you pretend that wealthy people earn the same way that less-wealthy people do (they don't), then both are naievely losing 8% of their income-earning time for that year.
It's still not fair, mind you—the wealthy person likely makes much or most of their money from diversified income streams that are less succeptable to temporary incarceration than the more-likely single salary-based income of a less-wealthy person.
Regarding the question of using children as leverage, this is addressed more intricately than I'll summarize here in contemporary cases e.g. with Elizabeth Holmes and the allegation that she, her partner and legal team have tried to lean on her having children as a way to attempt avoiding incarceration.
> Should rich people get less jail time because they lose more money because of time spent in jail (per day income is higher) than a poor person.
No. The point is that fines should be based on per-day income or some kind of similar measure of wealth. Which actually makes it consistent with the hypothetical economic punishments of being thrown in jail.
Shouldn't childless people get less time in prison, so they have more opportunities to find partners to get children?
I was thinking of this in context of wars. Where people with children should be first to be send in front lines. With those with most offspring being higher priority. And those with none the lowest.
FWIW, both the country where I was born and the one where I live have chosen a simple approximation: Fines are set at "x typical daily earnings" and the court will estimate the equivalent in legal tender, jail time is set in days.
I disagree that it's a "fine example of whataboutism", I think it's more 'apples and oranges'. How would you define whataboutism, or why do you think that it applies here?
Well, yes, that orange exists, but whatabout this apple? Typically with a clear and relevant difference between the two, and not mentioning that difference.
According to The World Economic Forum (WEF) speeding tickets in Finland are linked to your income.^1 This means that a speeding ticket is calculated as a percentage of your income, and so the fine will also scale with whatever you make.
Unless your money doesn't come from your "salary", and you declare "the salary" to be $1 a year. Then you pay nothing for double parking even if you're firthy rich.
Is that really true, though? As far as I know it's based on disposable income after tax and necesary living expenses. Meanwhile if it's a businessman without a stated income that year, the court may still base the fine on net worth, assets and investments. I would love it if a Finish person could expand upon this, though.
That's how we have it in Finland and it works. Fines are supposed to hurt you financially, not be a cost of doing business that hurts poorer people disproportionally.
How can you calculate someone’s income in a way that makes this feasible? Wealthy people 1) dont have most stuff to their name directly, 2) have capital gains which make income ‘spike-y’, 3) make money on many jurisdictions, many which may not be visible to the country fining the person
This is a kernel of a good idea; it can be refined further by making the fine a percentage of the combined value of all taxable property registered to that person (otherwise the fine hits middle class drivers disproportionately).
Would probably need to leverage something like the interstate drivers license compact to synchronize that data across all states, and there'd need to be solutions for edge cases e.g for people who rent cars and homes rather than own them.
You just took a simple and easily implementable idea and made it insanely difficult to realize. It seems worth trading a bit of theoretical "fairness" to have something that could actually work.
It's not "a bit" in this case. The entire point of the change is to reach those who can't be reached by it today. Middle class folk are still dissuaded by multi hundred dollar HOV fines, for instance, so what's the point of pegging a fee against their 100,000 dollar Porsche?
The goal is to tag the people for whom a few hundred dollars means nothing, and you're not going to get there with a percentage fine unless you're factoring in all their assets registered to the state and incentivizing the state to enforce tax evasion statutes. CHP, for instance, has at most two officers enforcing Montana plate dodging in SoCal.
That's the problem with "simple" statutes; they're easy to dodge and thus hurt the people who can't.
Why are you choosing to die on this hill lol, I'm trying to help your point.
How many SF, NYC, DC folk do you know pulling 150-250 a year driving cars that are 50% of their income? It's frequent; anecdata, I can think of a dozen.
That misses the forest for the trees without any of those. You still penalize low and middle income drivers and miss the people who disregard the social contract the most.
Missing the forest for the trees is foregoing a decent solution that a single city could implement in 12 hours for a solution that will literally never happen ever.
You think Montana is (or should) expose a complete picture of a citizen’s financial situation so that New York City can issue tickets a bit more fairly in the event that citizen visits NYC?
Won’t happen.
The point is not to punish every single violator exactly fairly, it’s to more effectively deter violations among everyone
Imposing the control on the people who cause the least problems relative to the problem population is worse than the baseline.
And most jurisdictions have laws promoting snitching on your neighbor for tax evasion anyway. You don't even really need the compact; just pour some of the fine revenue into enforcing property tax evasion. That simplifies it to just enforcing the fine against a percentage of registered wealth wherever you live, and the reciprocity challenge can be deferred to later. But then you're likely to score wherever the driver has their multitude of cars garaged.
Billionaires will still escape, but people definitively in the upper class will be more effectively deterred.
That is an excellent suggestion although obviously needs a minimum amount because a fair number of cars being driven around have a cash value close to zero.
When poor people talk about "taking from the rich", they typically mean (well) salaried people. Their bosses, managers, higher up employees… folks they personally know, just with more income.
The truly wealthy you describe are of course unaffected. But they're also off the radar for most – too far removed from their daily experience. And difficult to fleece for the state. So the sacrificial goat always ends up being the middle class.
No, they mean wealthy people. I had a discussion yesterday about an incremental inheritance tax of 10% every 50 month of minimum wage income. Basically in my country, that would mean 10% of the money you have bellow 65k, 20% of the money you have between 65 and 130k... Until 100% is txed. We might see increase in minimum wages soon.
I'm sure you're going to get lots of responses detailing situations where the outcome isn't optimal, but I bet the majority, if not all, of those will be an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. That is to say, I think the question should be whether the proposed imperfect solution is better than what we have now.
You can't make it perfect. But you can make it better.
Put another way: For the tiny proportion of people who are wealthy enough to obscure their income or get most of it from capital gains, the fines don't currently matter financially, so if they end up getting off more easily it has minimal effect. They get unfair advantages now and still would if you indexed by taxable income. But the much larger portion who earn well above median yet not enough to obscure their income would get a fairer/stricter treatment.
Rich people have high income and are affected by percentage-of-income based fines.
Wealthy people don't necessarily have a big yearly income, but they own a LOT of stuff and don't directly handle money in their own name -> not affected as much.
Actually wealthy people are also a lot more likely to have a chauffeur, why bother driving yourself when you can just rest in the back of a Rolls Royce or an S-Class Mercedes. You can just hire a new driver if the old one loses their license for speeding =)
Based off tax return and make tax fraud hurt. Sure some people will still optimize for tax avoidance but will be far fewer than the totality of those wealthy enough to disregard rules at present.
Every European country (even Finland) has harmonized rules about "tax residency". The rules are simple: If you actually and honestly live there at least half a year and one day of a calendar year, that place becomes your tax residency for that year.
The rich person buys a property in Monaco and goes there for half a year + 1 day. That year Monaco is their tax residency. They take out dividends from their off-shore (or Netherlands) holding companies. Boom, perfectly legal personal income taxed at super-low (or 0) rate that Finland has no idea about.
Then the person returns back to Finland and again accumulates their income into the holding company for a few years until they run out of whatever they got as a dividend.
You don't need citizenship at all. Not even permanent or temporary residency. You will become a tax resident of a state even if you have just a tourist visa. You don't need to own the property either, a rental apartment is just fine. Even living in a hotel would work if you can prove it was your "base of operations" during that time.
Not sure what's the distinction between rich and wealthy, sounds the same to me.
Well I think I meant something in between. You don't need to be from old money to get a property in Monaco and much less in other places in EU - I got several, and I started literally from 0. And you definitely don't need to be from old money to rent an apartment in Monaco for half a year. A senior software engineer (contractor) could afford it and would profit from the operation if they live in Scandinavia/Germany/Austria/France.
I have a good enough tax regime where I live in Central Europe - for 2022 I paid 8% including income tax, health and social insurance. But I'd definitely consider doing this if it was over 20%.
Then Jeff Bezos, who has billions, can pay $0 fines since AMZN produces no dividend income. Even if you count capital gains income, he could just take a big tax hit one year and then be in the clear for life.
Not to mention, he'll also qualify for welfare because of his $0 income.
Parking is a service that you receive in exchange for money. Our society has accepted that those who have more money are able to purchase more goods and services.
Fines are not payment for services rendered, but a deterrent for behavior we don't want anyone to engage in. If it doesn't scale, then it's only a deterrent for those who can't afford it.
I think average people would thing that they would be too high for the crime.
Minimum day fine for someone without income is 6€. Now parking fine is I think depending locations is 20-80€.
So you tell that this incomeless person parked the car. And we have set it at 5 day fines so 30€ at low end. On other hand day fine for median earner is around 35 €. Which would mean 180€ parkin fine.
Alternatively, provide two values and select whichever is higher e.g. "30€ or 1 day", this method is common with corporate crimes (e.g. "1 million or 1.5% global revenue", that sort of things). Even if you're on the low end of incomes a day in jail would hurt a lot for a parking fine.
What part of "equal under the law" did they sleep through in grade school? I understand that thinking is hard and it's much easier to just adopt the opinions presented by someone who gets paid by advertising products to you. But please try to think this one through. Arbitrary punishment based on class or wealth or any other factor not related to the crime is a hallmark of a banana republic, not a civilised society. Parking fines are a Trojan Horse - once such a scheme is adopted, it will be applied throughout the legal system.
Depends on how you define "equal". Both "you are fined $1", and "you are fined 1% of your income" sound like fair stabs at equal to me. Imprisonment deprives you of 100% of your income, so it's more like the latter.
In 2002, Anssi Vanjoki, a former Nokia director, was ordered to pay a fine of 116,000 euros ($103,600) after being caught driving 75km/h in a 50km/h zone on his motorbike.
All that said, I doubt the $103,000 had much effect on Anssi as say $1000 would have on me. I need want to spend that $1000 one day on food or housing. Anssi was making so much, my guess it's sole effect would be on how much his kids inherited.
Being fined X hours worth of income is also equal. Fines, i.e. losing money is second order approxmiation to IMO the equal punishment of losing time. Which can still be gamed by the rich, but if the wealthy do end up going to jail, they serve at least meaningful time where consequences are felt vs current fines that may has well be 5 seconds in the drunk tank.
No, they won't. That is not rational thinking. You could probably afford one parking ticket per year, so do you go out and deliberately double park once a year?
Quick sanity check - Any time you see/hear "rich people will do X" or "rich people should do X", just replace "rich people" with "I" to see if it makes sense. Just because someone has more than you does not make them any better or worse of a person than you. Same goes for the contrary, just because someone has less than you...
> No, they won't. That is not rational thinking. You could probably afford one parking ticket per year, so do you go out and deliberately double park once a year?
Jobs was infamous for parking in the handicapped slot in the parking lot and for driving a silver Mercedes SL55 AMG with a blank license plate. But how?
(Sure, call these pop sci if you want, but I'm not going to seek out primary sources for the sake of an internet comment.)
> just replace "rich people" with "I" to see if it makes sense
Would I become more of an asshole if I had orders of magnitude more money than the average person? It certainly wouldn't surprise me. At the very least, my ego would get quite inflated.
As you're already aware of the value and reliability of citing pop-sci and tabloid sources, I won't highlight it except to point out that even if the data holds (a big if), correlation does not equal causation.
And thank you for confirming my suspicion that your argument was more projection than reality.
> Would I become more of an asshole if I had orders of magnitude more money than the average person? It certainly wouldn't surprise me. At the very least, my ego would get quite inflated.
Correlation or causation makes no difference here. Regardless of whether you become an asshole by being rich, get rich by being an asshole, or become an asshole for separate wealth-correlated reasons, you will still be more likely to do things like park illegaly, and also have the means to treat any fixed-rate fine as a mosquito bite.
That is a can of worms. What is the operational definition of Rich?
- Networth?
- Income?
- Net Taxable Income?
Instead, it can be an escalating penalty that is based on repeat offences; increasing fines for repeat offences, culiminating in something like losing driving privileges, impounding of the vehicle, permanent loss of driving privileges etc.,
On the fence on this one, because it seems unfair to punish someone more just because they're doing well, for essentially the same crime. But... there was a drug dealer in our block of flats once who had so much cash he'd park his BMW outside the door on double-yellows, and he'd just pay the £50 fine several times a week, just to save him a 3 minute walk to the car park... so, perhaps a system of increasingly punishing repeat offenders maybe?
Another way to think is that you are not punishing them more, you are punishing them equally if you do it by % of "richness" Meaning that if a fine means that someone struggles to eat the last 2 days of the month, that should apply to everyone, no matter how much you make, it just happens that you have to take away more from the ones that have more to get the same effect. It also makes that those that are not soo well off are not disproportionally punished.
Lets make a imaginary extrapolation to see it in other light, lets say that there where a second human like species here on earth, but they live until around 1000 years instead of 100 but they experience time 10 times quicker, so for them 10 years feel like 1 year to us.
Would it be fair to do the same time in prison for them than us for the same crime? what feels psychologically like 10 years and 10% of our lives would feel to them like 1 year psychologically and will be only 1% of their lives, and if we started to put harsher penalties to account for them, they still will end up with kinda light sentences and normal humans would end up with absurdly high sentences.
If the idea is to punish so it is not done again, sentences have to be proportional to the one receiving the sentence to be effective if not you are over-punishing some are under-punishing others.
OFC this is with the idea that fines are punishments and not just paying for what you broke kind of deal, for example if it is a fine for parking in a place with a parking meter without paying, the fine should be what you did not pay plus a little bit extra.
> On the fence on this one, because it seems unfair to punish someone more because they're doing well
You're not punishing them more, you're punishing them similarly: the marginal value of money diminishes as you have more of it, a $20 fine to someone who earns $5000 a week is a lot less punishing than to someone who earns $500. By scaling fines to income / wealth, you're preserving the fact that this is supposed to be a punishment deterring from the act.
> so, perhaps a system of increasingly punishing repeat offenders maybe?
That's... already common? But if you have enough money, it would have to scale up quickly and drastically to have any deterrent effect, and it would still disproportionally affect lower-income individuals.
An alternative (or complement) is to create a flat resource, that's what points systems do (although they tend to still disproportionally affect lower-income individual: they're harder hit by the loss of mobility, and they may not have the time or money to attend to recovery courses when those are available).
> although they tend to still disproportionally affect lower-income individual
Any fair punishment will disproportionally impact lower-income individuals, since resources confer resilience and resilience resists punishment. If your goal is equal impact, you have to have unfair punishments, because you have to scale your punishment to the target’s resources.
If you want to punish someone equally with fines, you need to fine rich people a higher proportion of their wealth and income, not even just the same percent.
I'm not swimming in money but I earn well above average, and because I do my disposable income is a higher multiple of the average persons disposable income than my income is. To be fined even, say, a few days income for me is at most a minor nuisance. Maybe I'll feel bad enough to eat out at restaurants less that month. Maybe. To be fined 1 days income for someone low paid might mean they'll struggle to cover their bills or eat.
There's nothing equal about even a fixed proportion of income for that reasn. But it's significantly better than a fixed amount that doesn't take income into account at all.
If you truly want to punish people financially the same in the sense of making it hurt the same for the same transgression, you'd have to fine people earning above average not just a higher amount, but a significantly higher percentage of their earnings and wealth.
EDIT: I'm reminded of Marx discussion in Critique of the Gotha Program of the first proposed program for what became the German SPD of the use of the term "equal rights" which, after tearing the term aparts ends with "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal." That is, if you want equal outcomes, you can't treat people the same, because their situations are not the same.
Same theory in the UK (12 points on your license is a ban) but we have something like 11k drivers driving around on 12 or more points because they claim "not driving would be exceptional hardship".
Yeah that's the same here, not sure if it's the case for parking fines though. It differs county by county, and private parking providers each have their own sets of rules I guess
That's a pretty bold move for a drug dealer. I imagine they'd try and keep low profile to not invite a knock on the door. I guess things are different in Europe :)
Maybe we should just do away with fines and make everyone do same amount of slave labour. So instead a fine, you would spend x number of days doing some labour.
This does not solve anything. Poor would then mean "people with shorter life spans (older, sick)", and rich would mean "people with longer life spans (young, healthy)". That would mean that a morbidly obese, smoking guy would need to spend less days doing labour than some middle class guy who isn't even close to his retirement and puts priority on his health. So we would effectively punish the healthy.
People should just stop thinking about global policies, because it's a road to hell.
But why is it more fair to punish someone more because they're poor? Matching the fine to income/wealth is the best way to ensure the impact to the recipient of the fine is similar, regardless of personal wealth. A poor repeat offender may be bankrupted after just a handful of fines. A rich repeat offdner may be able to continue doing it hundreds of times afterwards without much issue.
If you dispense the same punishment to two individuals and one is less able to withstand that punishment, are you punishing that person more? I’m not sure that the answer is a simple “yes”.
For one, this would mean if you gave someone a 50% discount on their parking fine because they were poor, but it turned out they actually only had 25% of the assets of the rich person, you are still unfairly punishing the poor person more than the rich person. It can’t be correct that an observer has to know the financial status of every citizen to judge whether their government is being fair or not.
Singapore includes a demerit points system for some driving offences. Under this system, a driver "who accumulates 24 or more demerit points within 24 months will be suspended for a period of 12 weeks." [1]
So while richer people may not be hurt as much by the fines, they are more at risk of being suspended from driving if they repeat the offending behaviour within a certain time period.
I think so. A person who already lives paycheque to paycheque can be put into a really bad position by a fine but that same fine isn't even the tiniest deterrent to somebody well off.
For rich people it's trivial to hide their income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary -- it would only make things worse for the middle class, which is the worst class of all: too rich to get any help from the government, too poor to hire lawyers.
So, you guys try to hit the rich guy, but you hit the middle class guy instead, who pays all the taxes. Good job!
I don't agree and your answer kind of proves my point. They themselves don't have any responsibility, and they're not contributing anything to the society, yet they're the class that everyone defends and everyone pays for. Also if you're a registered homeless person they you're eligible for free food.
No. A fine should represent the negative externality to society. Flexibility indicates that society is interested in cash not the prevention of the externality.
It doesn't help that the size of SUVs and Pickup trucks have grown over the past 20 years. They take up more width and the length of truck beds are shrinking in place of more cabin space. I would love to find a truck that has a similar profile to a Chevy S10/GMC Sonoma but manufacturers are pushing bigger and bigger trucks to the market.
US is far to lax when it comes to cars/driving, just take the car and or licence of repeat offenders, make them earn it back. My neighbor was recently complaining to me about how it was unfair that his unpaid parking tickets amounted to more than the value of his car.
Another option for New York is that if you have too many civil violations you get banned from Broadway, Maddison Square Garden, and the Opera for the year.
This would have minimal impact on the poor, but would probably motivate the rich to avoid these civil fines.
In most western countries these days the tax level effectively decreases with wealth, so no... they might not have contributed "disproportionately" already
Imagine a government with eleven citizens, ten of which earn a thousand dollars a year and pay 50% income tax on each dollar, while the eleventh earns one million dollars a year and pays just 10% income tax on each dollar. If the government then spends every tax dollar on building a road, that road has been ~95% paid for by one citizen and ~5% paid for by the other ten. It’s quite possible in principle for the wealthiest people to pay a lower tax rate than poorer people, yet still contribute disproportionately to public funds. (In fact something like this dynamic is indeed happening in most Western countries, the top 1% usually account for more than one third of total tax dollars paid.)
They would have contributed disproportionately in absolute numbers, which are the actual numbers that get stuff built. It is of little help to anyone to pay a 50% tax if you don't earn or have much to begin with.
I’ll just add that there are two guilty parties in double parking: the person who does it, and the municipality which failed to provide adequate parking infrastructure to the town.
We should encourage less driving for many reasons, which is why municipalities should have fewer, not more parking spaces. If there aren’t enough available parking spaces, that’s a failure of pricing. Increase the price of parking to a level where there is always an acceptable number of available parking spots.
Possibly, but let’s not lose sight of the goal, which is to get people to drive less. There is no solution to this problem that allows everyone to keep driving the same amount as they always have! It may seem unfair that a small number of sufficiently wealthy people do not have to change their behavior, but enjoying privileges that are not available to most people is what it means to be wealthy. And in the meantime, the rest of us can console ourselves by remembering that if only rich people drive because only they can afford it, at least they are bearing the full cost of it, and hopefully the money they pay will go to something all of us benefit from.
All methods of decreasing driving are unduly burdensome on the poor.
That’s why I object to these policies:
They’re middle class and up people advocating that other people bear the burden for what they want done — often times, burdening the more productive members of society who perform critical jobs. If you actually thought it was important, you’d take unilateral action… instead of making “tragedy of the commons” excuses and demanding authoritarian impositions on lower classes.
That kind of entitlement by the bourgeoise is how we ended up with the worst governments in human history — and I’m sad to see us repeating it.
The cost for unlimited public transportation in NYC is $127/month (not counting the 50% discount if you're extra poor). I dare you to prove that owning a car (depreciation, interest, gas, insurance, registration, taxes, tolls, maintenance, inspections, etc.) actually costs less than that per month.
This is why I park my helicopter wherever I please as well, because of course, it's the municipality's responsibility to provide storage for my private vehicle.
Simple penalties create classes of crime; wealthy folks just ignore the penalty on double parking some poor schmuck because who cares about a $100 fine when you're making $1M?
These regulations are written to discourage unfair acts or behavior that exploites the social contract. It tells folks that the municipality thinks it's right for less-wealthy people to be burdened with providing comforts for more-wealthy people.
Means-tested fines actually get to the point of it: dissuade all people from doing something dangerous, indefensibly rude, et cetera, and not just poor folks.
For some additional discussion: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...