Yes. Fines should be a percentage of income.
That's how we have it in Finland and it works. Fines are supposed to hurt you financially, not be a cost of doing business that hurts poorer people disproportionally.
That's how we have it in Finland and it works. Fines are supposed to hurt you financially, not be a cost of doing business that hurts poorer people disproportionally.
Just curious how this works in practice
Would probably need to leverage something like the interstate drivers license compact to synchronize that data across all states, and there'd need to be solutions for edge cases e.g for people who rent cars and homes rather than own them.
The goal is to tag the people for whom a few hundred dollars means nothing, and you're not going to get there with a percentage fine unless you're factoring in all their assets registered to the state and incentivizing the state to enforce tax evasion statutes. CHP, for instance, has at most two officers enforcing Montana plate dodging in SoCal.
That's the problem with "simple" statutes; they're easy to dodge and thus hurt the people who can't.
Why are you choosing to die on this hill lol, I'm trying to help your point.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/much-middle-class-6-us-130110380.h...
How many SF, NYC, DC folk do you know pulling 150-250 a year driving cars that are 50% of their income? It's frequent; anecdata, I can think of a dozen.
And that's my point.
You think Montana is (or should) expose a complete picture of a citizen’s financial situation so that New York City can issue tickets a bit more fairly in the event that citizen visits NYC?
Won’t happen.
The point is not to punish every single violator exactly fairly, it’s to more effectively deter violations among everyone
And most jurisdictions have laws promoting snitching on your neighbor for tax evasion anyway. You don't even really need the compact; just pour some of the fine revenue into enforcing property tax evasion. That simplifies it to just enforcing the fine against a percentage of registered wealth wherever you live, and the reciprocity challenge can be deferred to later. But then you're likely to score wherever the driver has their multitude of cars garaged.
Billionaires will still escape, but people definitively in the upper class will be more effectively deterred.
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.
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.
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 =)
Every European country (even Finland) has harmonized rules about "tax residency". The rules are simple: If you actually and honestly live there at least half a year and one day of a calendar year, that place becomes your tax residency for that year.
The rich person buys a property in Monaco and goes there for half a year + 1 day. That year Monaco is their tax residency. They take out dividends from their off-shore (or Netherlands) holding companies. Boom, perfectly legal personal income taxed at super-low (or 0) rate that Finland has no idea about.
Then the person returns back to Finland and again accumulates their income into the holding company for a few years until they run out of whatever they got as a dividend.
Repeat until...
But that's how it goes and there are other countries you can use to evade taxes too.
Not sure what's the distinction between rich and wealthy, sounds the same to me.
Rich people have high incomes, wealthy people own a lot of valuable things (properties, land, art, stuff that keeps its value).
New money vs old money/generational wealth pretty much.
I have a good enough tax regime where I live in Central Europe - for 2022 I paid 8% including income tax, health and social insurance. But I'd definitely consider doing this if it was over 20%.
But if Switzerland can do day fines, I think other countries can as well, it's the will that's missing and nothing else.
Then Jeff Bezos, who has billions, can pay $0 fines since AMZN produces no dividend income. Even if you count capital gains income, he could just take a big tax hit one year and then be in the clear for life.
Not to mention, he'll also qualify for welfare because of his $0 income.
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.
Parking fines, is bit more complicated. Maybe the tax rate of the car or some current price... Then again rich could get cheap car and just use that.
Why not parking fines? They can be set in day fines as well.
Minimum day fine for someone without income is 6€. Now parking fine is I think depending locations is 20-80€.
So you tell that this incomeless person parked the car. And we have set it at 5 day fines so 30€ at low end. On other hand day fine for median earner is around 35 €. Which would mean 180€ parkin fine.
Most would think that to be excessive.
But is it?
Alternatively, provide two values and select whichever is higher e.g. "30€ or 1 day", this method is common with corporate crimes (e.g. "1 million or 1.5% global revenue", that sort of things). Even if you're on the low end of incomes a day in jail would hurt a lot for a parking fine.
or better: net worth.