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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

There's a significant difference, in that you choose to take on credit card debt, but you don't choose to be fined. I don't have much of a problem with credit card debt ballooning if you screw it up, but state-mandated punishments shouldn't be that way, especially if failure to pay is because of an inability to pay rather than simply not wanting to.

(To head off any "don't commit the crime, then" replies, do keep in mind that traffic enforcement is extremely arbitrary, filled with cases where following the law is substantially less safe than breaking it, and rife with profiling.)

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Many people do not have a choice over taking on credit card debt, in at least two ways:

1. Expenses over which they have little or no control, like health, addictions, etc.

2. Behavioral modifications are necessary to get out of debt, and often that is more than just a simple choice that people can easily make. The allure of credit cards for banks is that too few people are thoughtful enough to know that borrowing from the future is equivalent to spending money in the bank, unless you are anticipating an increase in your income, etc. So in a meta sense, they don't have a choice over how wisely they use their credit cards.

> The allure of credit cards for banks is that too few people are thoughtful enough to know that borrowing from the future is equivalent to spending money in the bank

Which is why I take full advantage of that 1-month $3k interest-free loan the bank is giving me, while keeping the $3k in a savings account which does have some positive interest. It's not much positive interest, but it's some.

Micro optimization, yes. One I can only afford because I have that money anyway, yes. But it makes me feel so shrewd and that feeling makes it worth it.

If you have a cash back card or one with points, you could even say it's more than a micro optimization. I put everything through a credit card and pay it off monthly. I get protections offered by the CC company AND cash back or travel reward points. A little discipline goes a long way.

> A little discipline goes a long way

Well I have one of those credit cards that stops working if you don't pay it off at the end of the month. So it doesn't even require that much discipline. Just some cashflow management in that I have to make sure that there is money on the bank account before the credit card charge happens.

That may be true, but it hardly supports the claim (at the start of this subthread) that it's ok for a fine to be like a credit card balance. At best it's an irrelevant tangent.

Well, hold on now. There isn't a 1:1 correlation between credit card debt and poor spending choices. Someone who'd never charge more on their card than they could pay off at the end of the month might do it, for example, if they just got a speeding ticket and didn't have any cash to pay for it. (I'd certainly take that route long before a pay-or-get-arrested plan from the court.)

In the case of traffic law, yes, you do choose very much to be fined.

What the law says or doesn't say is irrelevant in that distinction, it takes conscious choice (or carelessness: also illegal) to blow through a red light, or to park in a non parking area, or to drive over the speed limit. The law in general is extremely arbitrary, and you run the risk of penalties when you choose to break it.

The case of the guy in the article was the victim of an extremely broken system (outsourcing of payment plans? WTF?), but that doesn't mean the law he broke is somehow invalid.

In general, a failure of enforcement does not render the relevant law invalid.

It does not take carelessness to park in a no-parking zone where the signage is illegible, yet people still get fined for it, and there is typically no recourse.

It does not take carelessness to drive at the speed of traffic rather than turning yourself into a hazardous obstacle by driving 20MPH slower than everybody else, yet in many places this is a speeding violation.

It does not take carelessness to drive through a red light when the yellow is set so short that you don't get enough warning to stop for it.

Inconsistent enforcement may not render the law invalid in terms of whether it can be enforced on those who get unlucky, but it does have major effects on the law's legitimacy in a moral and public opinion sense.

It is basically impossible to live life without violating traffic laws. So "you choose to violate them" is at best meaningless and really is just plain wrong. If we're all going to violate them then we need to at least make sure the punishment isn't completely crazy.

Like so many things in life, this is so much easier said than done. The city that I live in has occasionally street cleaning days during which you can't park on certain streets, and in the winter it can be extremely difficult to find a parking spot that's within safe walking distance from my residence.

Things aren't so bad for me b/c I have an extremely flexible job, so I can leave early and get a good spot when everyone else is still at work. And I'm fairly fit and young, so if I get home at 1:30pm and there are no free spots (this happens...) I can walk a mile or two in cold temperatures without worrying about my health. Or, worst case, I can take the $30 fine.

It's not hard for me to imagine a large class of people for whom none of these options is a real option.

The set of people who have never broken a law includes zero people.

Further if one group is targeted more often than another I don't quite consider that a choice in the way you describe it.

> What the law says or doesn't say is irrelevant in that distinction, it takes conscious choice (or carelessness: also illegal) to blow through a red light, or to park in a non parking area, or to drive over the speed limit.

What about errors on behalf of the government? I have been fined mistakenly for parking without a valid sticker, even though the (correct and valid) sticker had been affixed to my car for months. Did I choose to be fined in this case?

Well they could take the fine directly out of their government assistance and then the fine would not balloon.

Right but she would go hungry or homeless...

So if you are poor enough you can speed with impunity? If you take away their license they could go hungry.

Well, I am sure that there are many people here for whom a $170 could be seen as a reasonable expense to get to an important meeting on time. Does that entitle the wealthy to speed with impunity?

That is probably the reason that you lose your license after three speeding tickets in a year.

> There's a significant difference, in that you choose to take on credit card debt, but you don't choose to be fined.

You choose to buy things on a credit card, sure, but you also choose to do the acts for which you are fined. And you can say that traffic enforcement is arbitrary, so that the costs may not be predictable -- but, then, the same is true of post-transaction changes to credit card policies and interest rates which impact the degree of indebtedness you actually end up with. (And, of course, since in many cases fines can be paid by credit cards, any arbitrariness and involuntariness that applies to fines can potentially directly produce credit card debt, so...)

I don't see how credit card policies are arbitrary in anything like the same way traffic enforcement is. The policies are explicitly spelled out and in my experience they are enforced pretty much uniformly. Make a late payment, get charged. Pay less than the full amount on the card, get charged interest based on a rate that was listed when you signed up. It's easy to have a credit card and avoid the fees, and if you do something wrong then it's predictable what will happen.

With traffic citations, it's nearly impossible to go somewhere without violating the law in some way and even more impossible to do so safely. Your odds of getting caught are slim, and your odds of being punished depend entirely on the discretion of the officer who caught you.

Further, it's possible and not even very difficult to go through life without ever having a credit card, whereas it's impossible to go through life without ever being subject to traffic enforcement. (Even if you never drive or bike, there are crazy laws for pedestrians too.)

"since in many cases fines can be paid by credit cards".

Less and less so, actually. "We accept only cash and check (or even cashier's check". On one hand, I realize that there's a merchant fee involved in payment by card, but it's also a convenient way to make payment inconvenient.

Actually, I have a traffic violation in the mail I need to resolve. The letter from the city says "YOU MAY PAY BY CHECK OR MONEY ORDER ONLY. WE DO NOT ACCEPT CREDIT OR DEBIT CARDS. DO NOT SEND CASH IN THE MAIL."

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