Putting people in jail costs money and is hence undesirable, so unless you're drag racing through a school zone or driving drunk/stoned, you're not going to jail.
The view of governments in the US toward traffic enforcement as revenue-source was made clear during the Great Recession. When a lot of folks were struggling with unemployemnt, pay cuts/freezes, etc., and morale was generally in the toilet, local governments began jacking up speeding fines in order to make up for lost tax revenue. And people wonder why the relationship between citizens and LEOs in this country has become so antagonistic.
It's the goal of the state policy authorizing them, even if it isn't the goal of the local government issuing them.
IANATaxLawyer, but I imagine gaming the system would require you to take out non-taxable loans using that company stock as collateral, and hope that your lawlessness is caught during the living-on-a-loan years rather than the liquidate-and-repay years.
Really though a ~0.1% speeding ticket fine is not going to be an issue even if the press is impressed by a very large number fine.
This leads down a very slippery slope.
Is there really an epidemic of rich people committing crimes at a higher rate than the non-rich? It doesn’t seem like criminality rates are higher among the rich, thus the premise that rich people should have a larger deterrent doesn’t seem to have much support in terms of evidence.
How much opportunity cost those days have, or how much money you lose as a result of your jail time, is irrelevant. The punishment is taking away your personal freedom.
Jail time is a fair punishment: Nobody likes having their freedom taken from them. There is no need to scale it.
But its different for fines. If you drive a 100k€ car, you're not going to give a shit about a 50€ fine for speeding. And my personal experience seems to suggest this is true: Drivers of expensive cars often ignore speed limits and "no parking" signs.
So one thing we could do is add a mandatory jail sentence for speeding. You drive to fast, you go to jail for a day. But that seems a bit harsh, so maybe we stick with the fine, but make it so that it also hurts people who make a lot of money.
In fact, the finnish fining above is a system of day-fine: the sentence is expressed in day-fine, each "day" of the fine is multiplied by the offender's day-fine factor (baseline is about half the daily disposable income — daily income after taxes & basic living allowance) and that yields the fine's actual amount.
For court-ordered fines of sufficient size they can also be converted to a prison sentence at a ratio of 3 day-fine to 1 day in prison (rounded down).
If the goal is deterrence, then we need care about how subjectively costly the punishment will be to each person. Having a high income doesn't make your time subjectively more valuable, but it does mean that you can trade it for more money. A rich and a poor person would likely value a day of their own time quite similarly, but they would each value $100 quite differently.
Jail has both the purpose of deterrence and rehabilitation. Since the method is essentially depriving criminals of their time and freedom then wealth has nothing to do with it. Either way it's probably equally painful for a CEO as a factory worker.
As for driving licenses, they are administrative expenses not fines. I assume you already know this so I'm not sure what your point is.
I'm not sure how it works in your country but in the UK too many speeding tickets and you will loose your license. The exact number depends on the severity of each offence, but we get max of 12 points over 3 years [1] so they stick with you - repeat offenders are given even stricter rules after getting their license back.
I get a sinister smile when observing rich people in those big shiny 4x4s on some stretches of motorway I know are littered with speed traps... It's a funny equaliser - I do the limit, but those types of people always gota be in front of someone with a shitter car - but the regret is apparent in their latent brake lights after the flash.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/driving-disqualifications
It's a shame this type of law that equalises wealth isn't more common, for instance in a related matter - I've heard plenty of stories about rich people basically using parking fines as parking tickets, there doesn't seem to be a limit or anything beyond a monetary disincentive. It's also more common to see expensive cars parked in places they shouldn't be, and i'm convinced this is the reason.
A rich man can just get a driver, take an Uber, etc., and is not likely to be fired for being late, assuming he works.
For a rich person, it just means they can't enjoy the pleasure of driving themselves around. You were talking about equalized impact to start with, I really don't see how this is a good example.
> If they don't care about driving and they were being a shit driver
These are also pretty big assumptions. I assume because of my demographic category, the times I was driving, and my car, several years ago, I received nearly two dozen tickets in a five-year period. None of the offenses were for speeding, but for various infractions like not coming to a complete stop (I was absolutely positive in every case that I did, especially after #3 or so I got paranoid about it), failure to yield, etc.
The only reason I have a license today is because I had a professional job, which allowed me the free time to go to court every single time without losing money and fight the ticket. I won every single time. Most people don't even know you can do that, they think you have to pay the fine.
If I had lost my license, I ultimately would have lost even that job. I would have to work remotely.
I am _not_ talking about equalised impact i'm talking about equalised results... the OP was suggesting that speed tickets don't stop rich people from speeding, but if you loose your license it does - that is the purpose of these laws, not to try to figure out how much punishment to deal out in relation to your personal wealth, punishment is a means to an end, not an end in itself - the end being to stop you from doing something damaging to society, in this case endangering other people's lives.
Taking away licences is an equaliser in this respect, because being rich doesn't give you more points to spend.
Licenses are for individuals, if some rich person wants to pay some _other_ individual who can actually keep their license that is fine, the law won because a safer person is driving.
What is stopping someone who loses their license from just driving anyway? They've already shown not to give a shit, so they'll continue driving without a license.
My dad lost his license many years ago and never stopped driving. He gets arrested once in a while, doesn't stop him.
You live in a very strange country, in the UK your dad would have had his car taken away from him and crushed... and if he repeatedly found other cars to drive without a license he would probably end up in prison.
I don't know how many they actually crushed, but it was some.
My dad has gone to jail for driving without a license before, but he'll go out driving when he gets out of jail. But usually his lawyer finds some sort of technically that gets him out of major trouble. I don't know the exact details, I try to ignore him as much as possible.
Other family members I know who have lost their license, it's stopped extractly zero people from driving. If you don't care about the other laws enough to get caught breaking them enough to lose your license you don't care about breaking "no driving without a license" law.
I knew a rich person once with a drinking problem: he kept losing his license but his solution would be to just hire a private driver the next day.
A casual partier though or even someone heading out and thinking they will take the chance of driving home and getting there ok, then yes I agree.
This one's mine: Because it's more fun than sex.
But if you are a model driver AND find it more fun than sex, damn you are lucky.
People still drive when they lose their license. They have to.
So the fines are no big deal to the rich here, but the right to drive is incentive enough to stop being an asshat.
I believe that because of this, the fines were made significantly higher for companies that did not identify the driver.
He has an affair. They get a divorce. To get revenge, his ex-wife tells a journalist that he once cheated a speeding ticket. Investigation reveals she knows that because she helped him do it. They both go to prison.
This revenge idea was planned with a lawyer/judge friend of the ex-wife. When the plan backfired, the judge falsified documents to mislead investigators. The judge got the longest sentence of the three of them and was disbarred.
What a trainwreck.
I'm sure it'd come up if you get in an accident as well, but probably the bigger fine in that case is the insurance company will use it for fault.
The primary detterant of it is likely that, because its a fineable offense, its less accepted by the general public, and you'll do it less flagrantly.
Then again even people texting and driving are not swayed by fines. In my region of the world a $3,000 fine is not a deterrent to many people. I say jail time would change that attitude.