Hacker News Reader

Comment by alien_ | Hacker News Reader

Confiscating profits wouldn't work, many companies are reinvesting their profits. Probably the best way would be to just make the fines hurt more, by using a fixed and non-negligible percentage of the monthly/yearly revenue, much like Finland does for traffic fines.

View on HN

I can’t believe we as a society don’t adopt this idea more. Punishment should be a percentage of taxable income of that year. The impact should equally felt regardless of your current financial status. Extending this to a corporation would simply put them in back foot in a market.. which is indeed the punishment.

In the US, income based fines have questionable constitutional allowability. I fall on the "the seem constitutional" side, but some people apparently think it violates the 8th amendment.

Percentage of revenue seems like the least likely to be gamed metric.

This is also a problem since some businesses have very high nominal revenues and very low margins.

Two companies with $100M in revenue, one with 2% margin and one with 50% margin.

You’d fine then the same amount?

> You’d fine then the same amount?

Progressive fines on people are based on their income, not how much they have left in the bank at the end of the month.

Sure, but expenses don’t vary a much for people versus companies.

You don’t meet many people who make $1M in a year who have unavoidable expenses of $900k.

Even CNN disagrees with your take.

https://edition.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20...

Fauci was wrong. Simple as that. Better to just own up to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com