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

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or if these are genuine questions. I suspect the former, in which case you need to unpack your arguments a bit more.

parking is a monetary fine, and thus directly related to the earnings of an individual.

Preventing a good parent from caring for thier child for an unrelated mistake should be somthing the courts take extreemly heavily.

Jepodizing a business that employees people might will be taken into account.

A fine example of whataboutism.

FWIW, both the country where I was born and the one where I live have chosen a simple approximation: Fines are set at "x typical daily earnings" and the court will estimate the equivalent in legal tender, jail time is set in days.

Incarceration by itself is poorly correlated to the goal of reducing overall crime and reducing recidivism. Putting people in prison should be a last resort, instead of the first resort that the US and some other countries treat it as.

Regarding jail time for the wealthy, you're still thinking in simple numbers instead of means-tested comparisons. A more-wealthy person and a less-wealthy person that go to jail for 30 days both are physically restricted for 8% of a year. If you pretend that wealthy people earn the same way that less-wealthy people do (they don't), then both are naievely losing 8% of their income-earning time for that year.

It's still not fair, mind you—the wealthy person likely makes much or most of their money from diversified income streams that are less succeptable to temporary incarceration than the more-likely single salary-based income of a less-wealthy person.

Regarding the question of using children as leverage, this is addressed more intricately than I'll summarize here in contemporary cases e.g. with Elizabeth Holmes and the allegation that she, her partner and legal team have tried to lean on her having children as a way to attempt avoiding incarceration.

If you care primarily about the financial impact of jail, then that would be an argument for the opposite of what you suggest: A rich person is likely to be less affected by the loss of a days income than a poor person, and so if the financial value of the time spent in jail was all that mattered then rich people ought to be imprisoned longer for the same crime, not shorter.

Since the financial impact is not the main consideration of jail time, it shouldn't be major factor.

With respect to children, children whose parents are imprisoned are more at risk of future problems, and so irrespective of other considerations it may well be preferable to society to take it into account.

> 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.

Elizabeth Holmes seems to be counting on this one.

Shouldn't childless people get less time in prison, so they have more opportunities to find partners to get children?

I was thinking of this in context of wars. Where people with children should be first to be send in front lines. With those with most offspring being higher priority. And those with none the lowest.

> 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.

No. The point is that fines should be based on per-day income or some kind of similar measure of wealth. Which actually makes it consistent with the hypothetical economic punishments of being thrown in jail.

Unless your money doesn't come from your "salary", and you declare "the salary" to be $1 a year. Then you pay nothing for double parking even if you're firthy rich.

Based off tax return and make tax fraud hurt. Sure some people will still optimize for tax avoidance but will be far fewer than the totality of those wealthy enough to disregard rules at present.

Could probably get pretty close by making it a % of the current Blue Book value of the car. No offsite data needed.

I'm sure you're going to get lots of responses detailing situations where the outcome isn't optimal, but I bet the majority, if not all, of those will be an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. That is to say, I think the question should be whether the proposed imperfect solution is better than what we have now.

You can't make it perfect. But you can make it better.

Put another way: For the tiny proportion of people who are wealthy enough to obscure their income or get most of it from capital gains, the fines don't currently matter financially, so if they end up getting off more easily it has minimal effect. They get unfair advantages now and still would if you indexed by taxable income. But the much larger portion who earn well above median yet not enough to obscure their income would get a fairer/stricter treatment.

You're thinking different "rich".

When poor people talk about "taking from the rich", they typically mean (well) salaried people. Their bosses, managers, higher up employees… folks they personally know, just with more income.

The truly wealthy you describe are of course unaffected. But they're also off the radar for most – too far removed from their daily experience. And difficult to fleece for the state. So the sacrificial goat always ends up being the middle class.

This is a rich vs wealthy thing :)

Rich people have high income and are affected by percentage-of-income based fines.

Wealthy people don't necessarily have a big yearly income, but they own a LOT of stuff and don't directly handle money in their own name -> not affected as much.

Actually wealthy people are also a lot more likely to have a chauffeur, why bother driving yourself when you can just rest in the back of a Rolls Royce or an S-Class Mercedes. You can just hire a new driver if the old one loses their license for speeding =)

Parking is a service that you receive in exchange for money. Our society has accepted that those who have more money are able to purchase more goods and services.

Fines are not payment for services rendered, but a deterrent for behavior we don't want anyone to engage in. If it doesn't scale, then it's only a deterrent for those who can't afford it.

Yes you probably could but taxes, that are already proportional, will cover most of the cost of the parking.

That is effectively the case. Taxes, in theory, scale with income and a lot of the car infrastructure is tax subsidized including street parking.

> Not parking fines, they are fixed amount by municipality.

Why not parking fines? They can be set in day fines as well.

No, they won't. That is not rational thinking. You could probably afford one parking ticket per year, so do you go out and deliberately double park once a year?

Quick sanity check - Any time you see/hear "rich people will do X" or "rich people should do X", just replace "rich people" with "I" to see if it makes sense. Just because someone has more than you does not make them any better or worse of a person than you. Same goes for the contrary, just because someone has less than you...

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

If you dispense the same punishment to two individuals and one is less able to withstand that punishment, are you punishing that person more? I’m not sure that the answer is a simple “yes”.

For one, this would mean if you gave someone a 50% discount on their parking fine because they were poor, but it turned out they actually only had 25% of the assets of the rich person, you are still unfairly punishing the poor person more than the rich person. It can’t be correct that an observer has to know the financial status of every citizen to judge whether their government is being fair or not.

Same theory in the UK (12 points on your license is a ban) but we have something like 11k drivers driving around on 12 or more points because they claim "not driving would be exceptional hardship".

Yeah that's the same here, not sure if it's the case for parking fines though. It differs county by county, and private parking providers each have their own sets of rules I guess

This does not solve anything. Poor would then mean "people with shorter life spans (older, sick)", and rich would mean "people with longer life spans (young, healthy)". That would mean that a morbidly obese, smoking guy would need to spend less days doing labour than some middle class guy who isn't even close to his retirement and puts priority on his health. So we would effectively punish the healthy.

People should just stop thinking about global policies, because it's a road to hell.

> although they tend to still disproportionally affect lower-income individual

Any fair punishment will disproportionally impact lower-income individuals, since resources confer resilience and resilience resists punishment. If your goal is equal impact, you have to have unfair punishments, because you have to scale your punishment to the target’s resources.

I don't agree and your answer kind of proves my point. They themselves don't have any responsibility, and they're not contributing anything to the society, yet they're the class that everyone defends and everyone pays for. Also if you're a registered homeless person they you're eligible for free food.

Nobody thinks about the middle class, only IRS.

(I'm ready for downvotes)

They would have contributed disproportionately in absolute numbers, which are the actual numbers that get stuff built. It is of little help to anyone to pay a 50% tax if you don't earn or have much to begin with.

Imagine a government with eleven citizens, ten of which earn a thousand dollars a year and pay 50% income tax on each dollar, while the eleventh earns one million dollars a year and pays just 10% income tax on each dollar. If the government then spends every tax dollar on building a road, that road has been ~95% paid for by one citizen and ~5% paid for by the other ten. It’s quite possible in principle for the wealthiest people to pay a lower tax rate than poorer people, yet still contribute disproportionately to public funds. (In fact something like this dynamic is indeed happening in most Western countries, the top 1% usually account for more than one third of total tax dollars paid.)

The same people that decide the amount now? Why would that change.

> Increase the price of parking to a level where there is always an acceptable number of available parking spots.

That would be favoring rich people, though.

Found the guy that’s never been to Hoboken.