If that is the ultimate goal, then fine equitable punishment would include fines targeting versus ability to pay.
However, if the system is simply seeking recompense for an action then it is unfair to place a higher fine on someone simply because they have more money.
For traffic offenses such as speeding, perhaps stopping re-offending is the goal since speeding always carries a higher risk accidentally harming someone else.
For a parking meter offense, I think the goal is simple recompense as if you had put in more money at the outset, you would not have been fined.
The two replies above mine in this thread are talking about speeding offenses, which is the thread of discussion that I am responding to.
I appreciate your trying to bring it back to the original posting, but your reply is a bit too deep within the thread to be effective.
No he's not; you simply can't punish people equitably by financial means. License penalty points, bans, sure, but you just can't equate fines against differing incomes when not all costs and opportunities are relative to income.
I don't agree the ultimate goal is to prevent reoffending either, it's surely to prevent offending, which it failed to do in this case amongst many others.
He's not punished "more", he's punished equitably. The ultimate goal is not to collect $100, it's for the offender to not reoffend.
Disposable income is an actual objective and important concept, and if you ignore it when handing out financial punishment it just stops being punishment at all for people sufficiently wealthy to not give a single flying fuck.
Having "put the work in to build a successful company" — or just inherited their wealth — should not make one immune to punishment, yet that's exactly what happens with unscaled fixed-amount fines.
> You end up with silly (IMHO) situations like someone getting a $290k fine in Switzerland for 85mph in a 50 zone.
There's nothing silly about it. If that's a $500 fine for somebody with an income of 7 figures, it's not a punishment at all and completely fail at its purpose of making the offender not reoffend: they could get such a fine every single day and live just fine while an offender on US minimum wage loses two weeks worth of work on a single fine.