That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. It is also supposed to be a fairly mild punishment so if it is always so high that you can’t pay but have to go to prison then you are suddenly handing out very severe punishment for minor infractions.
That is why that system doesn't work. For most things the required amount of deterrent doesn't depend on your income. For example, if it costs $100 to dispose of motor oil properly but $0 to dump it in the sewer then the fine has to be at least $100. But that means it needs to be at least $100 for everybody, or there will be people who find it profitable -- even to the point of setting up a "motor oil disposal" company where they dump everyone's motor oil in the sewer and then just pay the fines. But if you set the amount high enough that it deters the lowest income person and then scale it with income, you end up with unnecessarily draconian penalties on ordinary people.
It also becomes an obvious arbitrage opportunity. For example, if a rich person wants to travel fast by car then they get a low-income chauffeur so that the speeding fine is less. Income-based systems are always susceptible to this, where the super rich pay the cost of doing the arbitrage and what the system really ends up doing is hammering the middle class because they can't justify the arbitrage so they end up paying higher rates than the rich. See also corporate income tax, paid by local businesses but not huge international ones.
Finland only gets away with it because they have much less income inequality, and in particular much less poverty, so the ratio typically doesn't scale to the point that it starts causing huge problems like this.
In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
The problem is the opposite of that -- it isn't that the fine on low income people is too high, it's that it's too low to be a deterrent unless you make it high enough that scaling it makes is unnecessarily harsh for middle class people.
> In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
At which point you might as well just disband all large enterprises immediately because you've set up a system where you multiply the base rate of misbehavior by both the number of employees and the company's total revenue, which are both just proxies for size and so the penalty isn't just proportional, it's N-squared.
You also can't avoid the problem unless you go all the way to the root of ownership or people will just outsource the activity to a shell company, but then you end up imposing a billion dollar fine for littering because the offender works for a company which is owned by a mutual fund.
Easy fix: Set the fine as "N times daily wage, but at least X".
At which point low and middle income people all pay the same fine or as close to it as makes no difference, rich people avoid it through arbitrage and you have a system with no significant effect (except maybe that the super rich still pay less than the upper middle class).
Rich people deciding not to drive and hiring professional drivers and/or using Uber, Lyft, or a taxi doesn't seem like a problem. The incentive worked. I doubt people driving as a business are all that eager to lose their license.
The downside is that you're failing to do the thing you set out to do. In theory the rich person (say $1,000,000 in income) places a high value on their time, so you impose a higher fine on them (say $20,000) to try to deter them. But the Uber driver only makes $20,000 total, so the fine for them is only $400. Meanwhile a middle class person making $50,000 pays $1000 -- 2.5X what the rich person incurs (assuming the fine the Uber driver pays is amortized over the fares).
> Do you have a better example?
Name basically anything that incurs a fine. A rich person who wants to do it and is "deterred" by the high fine just hires a poor person to do it for them. This is often what they do anyway because it saves them the labor independent of lowering the fine.
> I doubt people driving as a business are all that eager to lose their license.
But that has nothing to do with the fine, it's a separate penalty which doesn't exist in most other categories, apparently isn't sufficient (everybody speeds anyway), and the incentives of the driver and passenger are already aligned. They both want to get there faster, the passenger to save time, the driver so they can get another fare sooner.
A progressive fine isn't going to solve inequality.
Poverty-level jobs, by definition, because the prerequisite to being a good fine-sink is having a low income.
> A progressive fine isn't going to solve inequality.
The problem is that it makes it worse by effectively imposing higher fines on middle income people than the super rich.
More to the point brought up about Finland's lower wealth inequality: yeah, that should be what we're shooting for. Say we return to a robust progressive income tax system where if you make over say, 10 million dollars a year, you get taxed 90%. The arbitrage loophole doesnt work because, what, are you going to split up your 10M/Year income between 20 different less wealthy people and have them spend your money for you in order to avoid the tax?
What am I saying, of course the rich would find a way to skirt taxes. It's like, their whole shtick. I loathe the whole "Of course I'll do every shady, up to and including illegal things, to pay less taxes because if theres a loophole I want to exploit it". No, in fact you are acting being an anti-social cretin who neglects to give back to the society that produced the material conditions that allows for your wealth.
How? You would have to prove collusion between them rather than just a normal contractor-type relationship where the contractor does something unsavory entirely of their own volition.
> Say we return to a robust progressive income tax system where if you make over say, 10 million dollars a year, you get taxed 90%. The arbitrage loophole doesnt work because, what, are you going to split up your 10M/Year income between 20 different less wealthy people and have them spend your money for you in order to avoid the tax?
Of course. That's exactly what happens in those types of situations. As soon as you hit the 90% rate, the next thing you know the spouse is on the payroll, or the kids, the parents, brothers and sisters, in-laws, cousins, friends of the family etc.
> What am I saying, of course the rich would find a way to skirt taxes. It's like, their whole shtick. I loathe the whole "Of course I'll do every shady, up to and including illegal things, to pay less taxes because if theres a loophole I want to exploit it". No, in fact you are acting being an anti-social cretin who neglects to give back to the society that produced the material conditions that allows for your wealth.
Right, which is why you need policies they can't avoid instead of ones like this which they can.
The best way to do this is a UBI funded by a flat tax. The rich can't arbitrage a flat rate and the UBI makes it progressive (meaning net transfer from rich to poor).
As to UBI, I am all for it but I have concerns as well. Like a super basic one being what is to stop commodity prices inflating proportionately to the new lowest possible income set by UBI. Say UBI is 20k for every human on Earth. Great, but what's to stop the rise in prices of commodities to essentially UBI adjusted income + original price of commodity? Im genuinely curious what you think.
So this is always the argument people make against a UBI because it sounds plausible and the answer is complicated.
The first thing to notice is that the same concern is present for any method of reducing poverty/inequality whatsoever. If the poor have more money then they'll want to buy more stuff and by supply and demand the higher demand raises the price of certain products. It's a thing that happens.
But the only way it eats 100% of the money is if everything has zero price elasticity of supply. Which it doesn't. For example, if people want more land, well, sorry, the supply is pretty much fixed. But if people want more housing, that we know how to construct, so if more people could afford it then we could just build more. (If we have asinine laws against building more housing, well, that is an independent problem with an independent solution.)
And most of the things people want are not practically limited in supply. If more people could afford a sailboat then businesses would make more sailboats. If more people could afford new clothes then businesses would make more clothes. It's not as if there is an insufficient supply of wood or cotton -- for many products the dominant cost is the R&D or some other fixed cost and having more buyers could make the unit price come down.
There is also a right to a "fair and speedy trial". Judges just have to start ruling that sitting in county jail for six months waiting for trial is unconstitutional.
I admit there's a Catch 22 logic here though. Once a punishment starts being handed so often that it becomes a problem for society, it becomes "usual".
[0] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/right-to-a-sp...
A basic principle of common law and the American justice system is that it's better to free the guilty than imprison the innocent. So just on American principles, letting poor people go on the assumption that they'll return for trial is better than keeping them in jail for lack of bail.
Bail tends to be set in relation to the criminal record of an individual, the seriousness of an offense, how much of a flight risk they are, and whether or not they're likely to be a danger to themselves or others if released. It's not the 'norm'. So for instance of all individuals (arrested for any offense) 77% of those with no priors end up being released without financial condition. For those with misdemeanor priors it's 63% and 46% for those with felony priors.
And there are excellent test cases that can experimentally show whether these release conditions are reasonable. For instance there are occasional emergency releases caused by things such as prison overcrowding. And this is where people that would not normally be released without condition, are. Of these individuals 52% end up being charged with pretrial misconduct! For the general population of people intentionally released that figure ranges from 27%-36% depending on the release type.
And when somebody is forced to pay bail, they have numerous options. Generally they only have to pay 10% of the cost of the bail. In some cases that can be paid directly to the court who will then refund that 10% once they return for and complete their trial. If that's not an option the way bail bondsmen work is that an individual pays the bail bondsmen 10%. The bail bondsmen then go to the court and pay 100% of the bail on behalf of the individual. They get that 100% back once the individual returns and completes their trial, so the 10% is their profit margin. This is also where modern day 'bounting hunting' tends to come into play -- the bail bondsmen have a very strong incentive to ensure that their clients do not flee.
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So the point of this all is that in the vast majority of cases we do simply let people go on the assumption they'll return to trial. For those that we don't let go, there tends to be a pretty good reason. That article from the BJS I linked has a great table at the bottom that offers some regression figures for release/return rates of various groups helping to determine how justified various decisions are. In most cases they are, in some cases they are not. It's pretty reasonable to conclude that it's a system that does well, but could be made to do better. But it's quite different from what you would portray it as.
I'm trying to find a more comprehensive article containing data across both misdemeanors/felonies and state/federal courts, but running up short. Their data seems to be heavily segmented in not so useful ways. If you find something along these lines I'd very much appreciate if you'd ping it regardless of its direct relevance.
One other thing you have to look at as well is the time frame. As time goes on you get closer to the real 'risk' rates. That's also detailed at the top of page 7. For instance only 8% of those those that would be rearrested were rearrested within a week, which goes to 29% in a month, 62% in 3 months, and 85% in 6 months.
Again it's very disappointing that the data aren't more clearly quantified and classified across documents.
Once criminals start going free because of easily fixed procedural problems, those problems will be fixed quickly.
Bear with me, I am not from the US.
The main way things get before SCOTUS is through the parties appealing the lower court decisions and then SCOTUS deciding to hear it.
For example, in 1980 they ruled that it could only be applied only if it involves a precise and aggravating factor[0].
Louisiana had a law that made the rape of a child punishable by death and SCOTUS overturned that law in 2008[1].
SCOTUS has consistent narrowed the crimes punishable by death in the past 50 years using the Eighth Amendment as a justification.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
That does not change the fact that SCOTUS has upheld the death penalty generally as being a Constitutional punishment.
Yes, although there are many things that SCOTUS ruled constitutional that are just unpopular in this day and age that nobody treads in that territory.
So we and all the states have the choice to just not practice that, for example. Yes, in this case that is unlikely. Still an option.
As far as popularity goes though, the death penalty has been more popular than not for all but a brief time in the 60's[0], and I think it's dangerous to conflate popularity with Constitutionality, or to suggest even implicitly that they should have any bearing on each other.
Fictional example: speeding 20km/h above the limit gets 30 day-fines. So they'll calculate how much you'd earn in 30 days, subtract essentials and that's your fine.
Why not, assuming that laws against speeding exist for public safety? (That's a dubious assumption, but if it's untrue then the speed limits need to be changed until it is.)
The cost of an accident can end up being lives, not just money, so it's hard to talk about "the cost of an accident." Even if you take a hard-nosed economically rational position and assign a monetary value to each life, the typical value is something like $10 million.
The point of these fines is to deter the behavior. If you put a cap on the amount of the fine, then sufficiently wealthy people are no longer deterred. You're essentially making it so that they can break this law with impunity because they're rich.
As for giving the police the wrong incentives, if they have any incentives related to the amount of money they bring in through fines, they already have the wrong incentives. Money from traffic tickets should never end up anywhere near the police budget.
Edit:
I would be less not ok with fines that scaled by income if they were reasonable for the infraction. Fines in the US are not reasonable (with a few state by state exceptions) unless you're upper middle class. If we scaled fines in the US so everyone got screwed as hard as poor people get screwed that would be very, very bad. If we were to scale fines by income then the middle or upper middle should be the point where there's not much difference (i.e. those people pay the same under the current system and some hypothetical income based system) because that's the point you need to be at for fines to be roughly proportional to the offense. I have zero faith that that could be implemented. What would likely happen is that the poor would still get screwed and everyone else would get just as screwed which is worse than the current situation.
If not, I don't see how this would be a problem. If your income is X times higher than mine, you will be fined X times more. Given your income, you can afford it, but it is still a deterrent (I, on the other hand, would go back to square "minus one" if I had to pay the same amount as you).
The way this is likely to work in reality if that you go to square minus one if you get fined and I go to square minus one if I get fined. So we've gained nothing except screwing more people and making the state more dependent on revenue from fines. Fines never go down, only up. An income based system would mean we all get screwed.
I have no problem with income based fines on paper. I have zero faith in their ability to be used properly in the US. Better to just lower fines across the board. It's not like the threat of a fine is what's keeping the vast majority of people from driving at triple digit speeds or littering.
You forget that the people who have "made it" hold disproportionate political influence. If you think a 0.1% fine on your annual income is too high because it is $100+, then you would fight to reverse this policy.
Meanwhile the people who are living paycheck to paycheck and have very little influence don't have to worry. 1% is very little for them, maybe $20 or so.
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi... shows that sweden, finland, norway also have good mobility (behind denmark though).
edit: see also https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf - it's in the 1st page abstract.
https://gavinkellyblog.com/where-has-income-mobility-been-ri...
(Also, the OECD's own press release on the article's source publication doesn't raise the same points and points at the Nordic countries as good models: https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/action-needed-to-tackle-stalle... - maybe economists, or OECD economists in particular, think that inter-generational mobility is a better measure?)