It should be like in Finland where fines are tied to your income. Poor people get small fines, rich people get big fines.
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 the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich.
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.
I'm not really seeing the downside of arbitrage. Do you have a better example?
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.
> I'm not really seeing the downside of arbitrage.
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.
I think you're presuming the loophole here a bit too quickly. It shouldnt be difficult to determine when it is that a wealthy person hired a less wealthy person to do the unsavory thing in order to exploit the lower fine.
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.
> It shouldnt be difficult to determine when it is that a wealthy person hired a less wealthy person to do the unsavory thing in order to exploit the lower fine.
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).
To the first point, good question. I dont know how we could solve that problem writ large.
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.
> 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.
This is not an insurmountable hurdle. For people too poor to afford even the lowest fine, you can do something like community service at an effective pay rate of minimum wage in lieu of the fine.
In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
> For people too poor to afford even the lowest fine, you can do something like community service at an effective pay rate of minimum wage in lieu of the fine.
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.
> [The problem is when the fine is] too low to be a deterrent unless you make it high enough that scaling it makes is unnecessarily harsh for middle class people.
Easy fix: Set the fine as "N times daily wage, but at least X".
> 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).
There is actually a constitutional right to be free of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the U.S. Judges just have to start ruling that $250 is cruel when someone is in poverty.
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.
SCOTUS has already ruled that the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment - more specifically, that since it is not unusual, it is not a Constitutional violation despite where you feel it falls on the cruelty spectrum. A common pleas or even circuit court judge can't simply say "lol whatever I'm going to ignore that." Only SCOTUS can reverse its position on the Constitutionality of the death penalty.
Your substitution is inaccurate. The rulings effectively mean that the death penalty is cruel and unusual except in certain, very specific circumstances. Only the most extreme crimes qualify. Even the rape of a child is not extreme enough unless done multiple times. It might seem applicable to only a few cases, but that is only because few states attempt to apply the death penalty except in the most extreme circumstances.
A lower level court judge can make a ruling, like finding a $250 fine for a poor person cruel, that stands, because it's not a SCOTUS issue. The death penatly sure, and the legality of it has already been decided in the U.S., and is usually for serious crimes. But for low-level offenses, the likes of which are rarely — or basically never — brought before SCOTUS or higher level courts, a judge can rule in any way he sees fair, as that's his job.
Of course the states are free to outlaw the death penalty, that doesn't address whether or not it is Constitutional. There are plenty of things that are completely Constitutional but which are outlawed in the majority of states.
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.
But SCOTUS can only reverse what is brought to it, right ? So a circuit court judge has to ignore that so that SCOTUS can have the occasion to reverse its position ?
Well, look at the alternative. Under the current system, besides the destructiveness of incarcerating often innocent people for months for trivial charges, you wind up with people pleading guilty to crimes they never committed, just to avoid being locked up for months.
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.
This is a misrepresentation of the legal system in the US. There's an immense amount of information on this topic available from the Bureaeu of Justice Statistics. This [1] paper in particular is highly relevant.
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.
"Pre-trial misconduct" is not the same as something that is actually dangerous to society. People released prior to trial are held to a much higher standard than the rest of the population. Most of the pre-trial misconduct is just technical violations, like failing to maintain employment or not reporting in at the scheduled times. Of all people released pre-trial, 17% commit a technical violation while only 4% commit a new crime[1].
You're making the same mistake I did. Unfortunately something that's easy to gloss over is that these PDFs are broken up into groups that seem somewhat arbitrary, making comparison and extrapolation difficult. For instance the one you're mentioning is only for cases in federal district courts which is a very different demographic than arrestees at large. Similarly, my original source only was considering state level felony offenses (though that makes the 77% ending up released even more remarkable, but that 77% was not exclusively for no financial condition).
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.
I think it'd be pretty intuitive that there would be radically different rates for things among different groups, but sure check out page 7/8 of the felony document I originally linked. The rate of individuals being arrested for a new offense ranged from 13%-21%, felony rearrest rates ranged from 10%-13%, and so on.
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.
I think it'd be pretty intuitive that there would be radically different rates for things among different groups, but sure check out page 7/8 of the felony document I originally linked. The rate of individuals being arrested for a new offense ranged from 13%-21%, felony rearrest rates ranged from 10%-13%, and so on.
I'll observe that none of the statistics you offer covers the demographic of the article. I would be willing to wager that if you look at the same statistics split across income levels, you'll see a noticeable difference in rates.
If you accept for the sake of argument that a six month jail sentence waiting for trial is a violation of your Constitutional right to a speedy trial (it's not[0], particularly if you're waiving a jury trial and are being tried by a judge), the person whose rights were violated would need to sue and appeal on those grounds. It's very unlikely that on day 121 the judge dismisses the case, but they're certainly free to do that if they feel it was a violation.
I'm not sure it would be unlikely given the narratives of the article. At least it shouldn't be. Judges exist, partly, to prevent Kafkaesque application of rules from causing injustice.
Sure. That's already basically how it works with rules for gathering evidence, for example. If you improperly gather evidence, it becomes inadmissible, and if it was critical to making your case then the accused will go free.
Once criminals start going free because of easily fixed procedural problems, those problems will be fixed quickly.
Fines in general aren't. Fines so big that the individual cannot realistically pay them are up for discussion, IMHO.
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".
Most countries in western europe have a concept of day-fines. It's averaged income minus essential expenses multiplied by some amount of time.
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.
I think it would be a good idea to reduce the fines of those in or close to poverty and subsidize that by increasing fines for the wealthy. That said, what Finland is doing is ridiculous. A fine for speeding shouldn't cost several times the cost of an accident. It also gives police the wrong incentives. Why bother pulling over a beater car when they aren't going pay a fine? Might as well tailgate a Rolls Royce and cite them when they inevitably make a minor infraction.
> A fine for speeding shouldn't cost several times the cost of an accident.
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.
Yeah, that's always repeated over and over whenever someone points at the nordic countries.
But how, in this specific case, does larger population size impact the implementation of income-tied fines?
Edit, further specification: doesn't the US, at least on a state by state fashion, have some kind of standard declaration /way of determining your income?
Well, instead of just slapping on the fine amount, you must now have a process to determine the person's income for each and every ticket. The scale of that process would be much bigger in the USA.
Personally I really like the idea, but it might be a very expensive proposition to implement.
Edit: And could have unintended consequences for the court system, and create unintended incentives to ticket higher income people more vigorously than lower income (potentially creating unenforced laws in lower income areas).
I live in a high tourist area during the summer months (late May through early September). The police in our town are fairly strict, but extremely fair, when it comes to enforcing laws. However, there are certain tickets (i.e. speeding) where a significant portion of the revenue from the fine goes to the state. This is the case regardless of whether the infraction occurs on a "state maintained" or "town maintained" road. On the other hand, there are other types of tickets (i.e. parking violations) where 100% of the revenue goes directly to the town. What happens is that during the summer months (more tourists) tickets with a higher value to the town tend to get receive more enforcement time compared to tickets with a lower value to the town.
This is an issue of governance, not policing. The police are doing what the town has asked of them by valuing these tickets high, which is to punish parking infractions. If this is a problem, the townspeople need to get their government to relax these statutes. This is another way that income-based fines work well - the people with the means to influence this change now have an incentive to do so. This is also why it's unlikely to ever happen in most places, because as the article observes it is much more lucrative to find the sweet spot where you can toll people who are unlikely to be able to fight back (poor people, tourists).
> This is another way that income-based fines work well - the people with the means to influence this change now have an incentive to do so.
You're only thinking of one half of the problem. The rich people who are targeted more vigorously will be able to fight back. But the poor people who are left living in communities where the laws aren't being applied will have to live with the results of lack of enforcement. It sucks living in a place where the police will not punish offenders because it's not worth the effort.
>Edit: And could have unintended consequences for the court system, and create unintended incentives to ticket higher income people more vigorously than lower income (potentially creating unenforced laws in lower income areas).
I doubt that would be the case, because wealthy people have access to better lawyers, and police know this. It's one of the reasons they're currently more likely to abuse poor people. They also know that there will be less societal outrage.
Sure, it might be more expensive (added bureaucracy), or less (less unemployed people in jail... the country pays for them, right?). It might lead to targeting, or to a fairer society.
Everything has drawbacks, and I am not competent enough to estimate all possible effects on society at large. But the current system does not seem to be perfect either, and ideas for improving it should be considered (and sometimes discarded, of course).
Most of Scandinavia has no financial privacy. What people earn and how much tax they pay are published online. This would make penalties based on income much easier. The US values financial privacy much more. It's also a very different society. It's easy to imagine precisely what would happen if peoples incomes in the US were published.
Everyone in the US who makes more than 10k (which I assume would be the minimum bracket for a fine) has to file income tax, and it would take a single bill to make this info available for the purposes of assessing fines; it doesn’t have to be public. And sure, some people cheat on taxes, but some do in Scandinavia as well.
More than half of the U.S. states have less than 5 million population. Moving violations and traffic tickets are usually administered on a state, county or local level. These aren't federal crimes, so it makes sense for each state to have their own unique system, as they often do.
In fact, as I write this it seems obvious that this system could be implemented without too much trouble in at least on U.S. state. Why wouldn't they jump at the additional revenue?
Retorts involving a country's homogeneity and ethnic make-up as a reason social policies work well in that country usually carry a more sinister unspoken subtext, i.e. that ethnic diversity makes an environment hostile to social policies, and/or that some populations are intrinsically unfit for social policies. I don't want to go too far down that lane, so let's say that guessing the reasoning underlying this argument and examples of populations that argument is typically applied to are left as an exercise for the reader.
It’s not, but this argument comes up for absolutely everything Scandinavian countries do: universal healthcare? America’s too big. Prison reform? America’s too big. Not treating poor people like garbage? America’s too big. Oftentimes there isn’t even any reasoning behind why America’s size would be a problem, which is a good clue that the argument is bunkum.
So now that I've "made it" I can get screwed back to square one because I rolled a stop sign at 1am and the cop doesn't like my attitude during the following game of 20 questions they always want to play when they're fishing. Screw that.
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.
Are you implying that having "made it" grants you the right of "rolling a stop sign at 1 am"?
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).
>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.
> An income based system would mean we all get screwed.
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.
Yes, deliberate abuse of the laws would be the main problem and nobody could be trusted to run such a lucrative fine program. It would just be another excuse to treat people like piggy banks and to rob them as often as possible.
With the exception of Denmark, social mobility is low in Scandinavian countries, but wealth inequality is also low, so the idea of getting screwed back to square one is very American. Breaking the law should hurt equally for the rich and poor - unless you think the poor are inherently worth less.
So this picks the short term income mobility, the picture is titled "Share of people remaining in the bottom fifth of incomes after four years". It's interesting for sure, but it takes some thinking to interpret in relation to usual intergenerational mobility measure. For example: UK is known for its thin social safety net, so income drops and hikes are hard and steep, and Denmark is known for its short but generous unemployment compensation - again leading to steep short term income changes.
(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?)
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.