If You Get a Speeding Ticket, Should Your Income Determine the Price?

This question reminds of the old French Socialist joke:

A tourist visiting Paris and sees an old, ragged, man digging through the garbage outside a restaurant looking for food get arrested. He approaches the cop and says, "He's just a poor man trying to get a meal! How can you arrest him? This the land of 'egalite"!"

The cop replies, "But, monsieur, the law is equal. If I see a rich man digging through the garbage, I will arrest him."

http://www.good.is/post/if-you-get-a-speeding-ticket-should-your-income-determine-the-price/

In Finland, speeding tickets are based not only on how fast you’re driving, but also on how much money you make. Mental Floss has a great rundown of five seriously costly moving violations, including a $103,000 fine for driving 47 miles per hour in a 31 zone (converted from metric).

Sound crazy? Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. The idea seems to be that income-related tickets would affect the rich just as significantly as the poor—and therefore dissuade them equally. That part makes a lot of sense, and it could surely do wonders for a city’s revenue. Then again, revenue-centric law enforcement can lead to some morally questionable priority sets on the part of officers.

What do you think? Should the size of the fines we pay for infractions be contingent on our incomes?

16 years later he met with the family of the two women they could gain some sense of closure.

My guess is that if he had been a poorer man who upon waking up in the hospital couldn't quite remember why he drifted over into the right lane, his punishment would have been different.

If two different people run a stop sign, the fine should be the same for the person in the clunker and the person in the Benz.

I don't think it would be right to change the punishment for the same offense.

even though the money is the same.

Hell what's the incentive to get rich if life sucks at the top too? (sort of tongue in cheek)

...at least that's been my incentive (though I'm not exactly rich and never will be)

If they are from an ownership society they will most likely abandon security as their primary motivation and replace it with status.

Of course there are always exceptions when dealing with humans and many on DU may be an exception.

It's true that many pursue wealth for the status it gains them.

...but I work with about 400 people who make over $90k/year, with about 2/3 making over $150k/year. We're not wealthy, but I could count the number of people pursuing "status" on one hand.

is not:

If I speed, might I get caught? yes no

If yes, might I get fined? yes no

If yes, can I afford it? yes no

If no, perhaps I should not speed.

...using this method.

Run a stop sign?
The penalty is 1 per cent of your annual income.

There!
Doesn't get much blinder than that!

Net or gross? Pre-tax or post-tax? Do you factor deductions for other losses? Do you base it on current income, or previous year? What if a guy make $60k last year, but was laid off and is now making $12k at a temporary burger flipping job? Will fines be suspended until after tax time to base them off actual income? Or are we going to require that local governments be forced to issue huge numbers of refunds every year (or issue supplementary tickets) for people who's stated income for the year of citation didn't match their real income?

And what do you do with the rich trust fund babies with millions in the bank and no real job or yearly income to speak of? Do they get a pass?

The idea sounds good, and I'd support it if there were a reasonable way to do it, but you have to remember that there are millions of tickets issued every year. Are we going to force a judge to review the financials of each and every person getting a parking ticket to determine what their fine should be?

It's one of those ideas that fails horribly once you look at the details of actually implementing it.

Oh well!

Is 5 years out of 20 year remaining life expectancy vs 5 years out of 40 year remaining life expectancy less fair?
Or should health rapist get 10 years to make it more fair?

My fear is some police depts ALREADY spend too much time on revenue collection.

Financial hardships are entirely about punishment, whereas sentences have a component of rehabilitation to them (which requires a finite time period in theory).

You can easily see how a rich man could pay a $200 dollar fine (which would devastate someone in poverty for a month) without flinching. But could anyone argue that doing but 1 year of time is easy (where one wouldn't flinch) based on how many years of life one has left after they get out?

Indeed, equal justice means equal punishment! And if you force a poor man to pay $500, anyone with half a brain should realize the equal punishment of financial hardship imposed on a very rich man is a hundred times that.

A $100 fine to a guy who makes $300 per week should be equalized so the richer person pays proportionately the same % of his pay so the actual deterrence is equally effective for both people.

brutal punishment while $50 to Paris Hilton is like a sock with a hole in it to the rest of us.

I've taken defensive driving courses and have a car with all-wheel drive, traction control, antilock brakes, a performance suspension...and a motor that will take the car to 165 mph.

Give me a speed limit of 120 on the highway and you can base a speeding ticket on my income.

and threatened our highway funding, so we caved in and conformed with all the other States.

:cry:

I have gotten a few speeding camera tickets over the years. $75 each. I sniff and pay 'em.

No pain.

What if I were such that $75 were a week's groceries?

Lower the fine for the poor or raise it for the well-off. That's just dandy with me.

Don't do the crime if you can't afford the consequences? If someones income doesn't allow for mistakes like that, then why they would take the risk. It is the responsibility of the offender to not do it. Just a thought. People need to be responsible for their own actions, not find a way to make others pay more for their same actions.

If we you and I had to pay intellectual property tax, which would be more fair? A flat rate? Or based on IQ? I have no problem paying based on IQ even as I would be paying substantially more than you.

taxes on cigarettes is regressive. If one's budget is strained by increasing smokes 50 cents pack, one would think smoking could, and should, be eliminated. It is after all, wasteful.

If traffic fines are to be based on income, that would open the door for voting by income as well. Tax burden of $10,000 for example gets one vote, with fractional amounts of that $10k getting fractional votes. The more one pays to operate the government, the more say one has in that operation. Surely you can agree that a person with a tax burden of #14,000 should have a bigger voice than one who not only pays no taxes but receives a redistribution in the form of "earned income tax credit"

I've read that very proposal on other forums.

By logical extension, should prison sentences be issued to convicts based on how much time they have left on earth, ass calculated by life expectancy charts?

of equal punishment is?

Is equal punishment a set cost of a speeding ticket or a set percent of your income?

After deliberating on your post, I believe a set percent of income as a fine is closer to being equal in it's punitive effect.

Thanks for the thread, Tierra_y_Libertad.

who will drive in the car pool lane or park in a no parking or handicapped zone because they know that 1) chances of getting caught are slim, and 2) they can afford the fine.

So, yes.

A "day fine" is equal to one day of your salary so for a given crime,
you or I may pay a nominal amount whereas the CEO of Nokia might
pay a lot more.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olli-Pekka_Kallasvuo

Tesha

And, i NEVER speed. Never! But, i really hate this idea.
GAC