They misspoke, Finland fines a percentage of income, which would include money from selling Facebook stock to pay for rent, food, yachts, etc.

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.

Or liquidate a portion of your holdings and realize your gains in a non-penalty year. Either works.

That's harder to predict especially if fines are based on last years income.

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.

I’m not Finnish or a lawyer but I think their courts would see right through that sort of bullsbit

Make it a percentage of taxable income or something like that. Lots of people have non-salary income.

Zuckerberg gets his cash from loans against his unsold stock. He could keep doing that his entire life and never pay a dime of income-based tax.

Or a percent of wealth. Although that isn't really effective punishment for people who blow all their income and don't save anyway.

So should jail sentences be done the same way? If I am in jail 10 days, I lose a hell of a lot more money than some bum spending the same 10 days. So the cost of jail is much greater to me on a per day basis. This “based on wealth” concept is fine, assuming that also applies to jail sentences. We can’t expect an egalitarian scheme for fines if we neglect the same consideration for jail. Assuming our goal is inflicting pain proportionally. But people wouldn’t like a rich CEO spending a day in jail and a cab driver spending 25 years in jail for the same crime — even though the relative financial costs would be similar in terms of opportunity cost. Should a CEO pay $100,000 for a drivers license?

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.

The idea of jail is that your personal freedom is taken away as punishment for a number of days.

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.

> The idea of jail is that your personal freedom is taken away as punishment for a number of days.

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).

No. Scaling jail sentences based on income would mean that the monetary size of the punishment was (roughly) constant between a rich and poor offender; just like if they were charged the same number of dollars as a fine. However, just as with fines, it would mean that the subjective effect of the punishment is much greater for the poorer person.

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.

The goal is deterrence, not inflicting pain. If speeding fines where set at $3 people would probably just treat them as a cost of traveling. To someone very wealthy current fines may essential be that.

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.