If You Double-Park and You’re Rich, Should You Pay a Higher Fine?

[mattlutze]

Yes.

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...

[qazpot]

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.

Should a person with more children get less jail time because more children will be left without a parent as compared to a childless person.

[Technotroll]

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.

[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t...

[arprocter]

Where we live it's cheaper to risk a street cleaning ticket ($45 a week, if you get one) than to put it in a garage (300-400 per month)

[theshrike79]

Yes. Fines should be a percentage of income.

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.

[jrvarela56]

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

Just curious how this works in practice

[thunky]

> Yes. Fines should be a percentage of income.

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.

[6nf]

Then you gotta charge for parking the same way

[Ekaros]

Not parking fines, they are fixed amount by municipality.

Parking fines, is bit more complicated. Maybe the tax rate of the car or some current price... Then again rich could get cheap car and just use that.

[timbit42]

> Fines should be a percentage of income.

or better: net worth.

[eviks]

hurt you financially = cost of doing business

[0xbadc0de5]

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.

[vivegi]

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.,

[adamlett]

It doesn’t seem that difficult to me. It’s obviously net worth.

[xboxnolifes]

Max(X% net worth, Y% Income, Z% taxable income)

Fixed.

[vegancap]

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?

[cmeacham98]

Counter-argument: The current system actually punishes them _less_, because the marginal value of money is lower for them.

A $50 fine will punish someone with $20 in their bank account a lot more than someone with $20 million.

[red1reaper]

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.

[masklinn]

> 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).

[vidarh]

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.

[SpaceL10n]

In my state, if you get caught speeding too many times, the fines increase until they finally take away your driver's license.

[papito]

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 :)

[Ekaros]

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.

[throwaway049]

Tow the car in his case, and more generally. If the lines are intended for safety, then towing is needed to maintain that safety.

[sohkamyung]

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.

[1] https://www.motorist.sg/article/534/traffic-offences-in-sing...

[captainbland]

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.

[self_awareness]

No.

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!

[throwawa14223]

No. A fine should represent the negative externality to society. Flexibility indicates that society is interested in cash not the prevention of the externality.

[jacknews]

Just make fines be time, not money. A parking fine is 2 hours washing dishes serving meals to homeless people, or cleaning the shelter toilets, etc.

[FactualActuals]

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.

[ofalkaed]

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.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

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.

[decross]

And young people should get longer sentences? The younger, the longer?

[PrimeMcFly]

If fines are not proportional than they only punish the poor.

[steffandroid]

Not just a higher fine, wealthy offenders should also have their driving licenses revoked and their vehicles seized.

[xtiansimon]

How about an “ascending” scale?

[admissionsguy]

No. The rich would have already contributed disproportionately towards the maintenance of the infrastructure.

[Aeolun]

Yes. Or rather, you should pay an amount that makes you likely to stop doing whatever it is regardless of wealth/income.

[self_awareness]

And who is going to decide what is the proper amount?

[user3939382]

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.