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Comment by MrZongle2 | Hacker News Reader

Exceeding the speed limit isn't exclusive to the poor and downtrodden. Should fines for breaking the law be different for different incomes?

Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?

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Absolutely. How is it just to punish one person with financial catastrophe while another with mild inconvenience for the same crime?

In some places it is:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-...

This is already being done in places like Finland, where speeding tickets are calculated as a percentage of income. This makes a lot of sense given the simple fact that $300 means very different things to different people. If the goal of a fine is deter law-breaking activity, why not use a system that incentivizes everyone equally?

Why not? They are in some countries, like Finland. It seems to work OK.

If the objective of the fine is to provide a financial disincentive to commit a violation, then the fines should absolutely be scaled for different incomes.

Otherwise, there is no real financial disincentive to the rich (who can hire lawyers with chump change), as is obviously demonstrated today.

Finally, it is extremely difficult to drive perfectly enough to avoid violating the speeding limit. Signs are often missing or covered. Limits change at unexpected locations, sometimes nasty ones (at the end of descents, etc). There is very little culture of speed change warning (varies state to state, but nowhere like, say, the UK).

The poor and the downtrodden have to apply a significantly larger effort to maintain speed limit compliance in their driving, because the downsides of getting a speeding ticket are so financially devastating.

What is the purpose of the fine? Is it to discourage people from breaking the law, is it to recover damages, or is it to make income for the government?

Nah it is pretty much a universal crime. And I actually think it would be correct to fine different people different amounts - say 10 minutes of income for every mile above the limit, up to a max of some percentage (say 20%) over the limit. That way you have the minimum necessary fine to make it not worth speeding without it being so that rich people can speed with impunity.

This is what Finland does. It's called a Day-fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?

This applies to basically everything that a society does. Even in small local elections you have decisions where a significant portion of the voters don't get their way, and those sorts of elections tend to be over things that people largely agree on (paving roads and plowing snow and ...).

This applies to basically everything that a society does.

I completely agree. Couldn't we say, then, that the current system of traffic fines (or at least the one that applies to the woman in this article) is something that has been approved by our society...rich and poor alike?

Would that previously existing agreement somehow render a new agreement less fair?

I don't think so.

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