Here’s a headline from New York City that caught my eye. If You Double-Park and You’re Rich, Should You Pay a Higher Fine?
The sliding-scale idea, known as a day-fine program, would mean that some fines would be charged in proportion to an individual’s income on civil offenses that could include littering, double parking, idling in a car or truck or open container violations, which currently carry fines ranging from $50 to a few hundred dollars.
New York Times: If You Double-Park and You’re Rich, Should You Pay a Higher Fine?
Yes. Not only for double-parking, but for every offense for which a fine is meted out. Imprisonment, despite its variation in quality, is at least equitable in that all of us share the same time. A year to me is a year to you.
Unlike time to be imprisoned, we do not all share the same income to be fined. A $500 fine to me means bills don’t get paid. A $500 fine to Warren Buffet is a rounding error. So, you end up with the double-parking scenario in New York, where it’s easier for the rich to pay parking tickets than to try to find parking.
I once read “if the penalty’s a fine, it’s only a crime for the poor” and it really stuck with me. Then I learned that in other, more civilized countries, they understand this.
As traffic fines in Finland are proportional to the offender’s income, he was required to pay a fine equal to 14 days of his income, which in 1999 was €14 million euros (£11.8 million).
LadBible: People Shocked After Discovering How Expensive Speeding Tickets Can Be In Finland
The problem with enacting this in America is that we don’t really believe the laws apply to rich and poor alike. Can you imagine the local sheriff incentivized not by stopping the darker-skinned drivers in the sports cars for hopes of a fat drug-bust asset forfeiture haul, but instead incentivized to stop the speeding white businessman in the Mercedes sedan for hopes of a fat income-based fine? We even think of a policy like that and the businessman phones up the Congressman he owns and puts a stop to it.
