I was wondering recently why fines are not scaled to income. A $200 fine is no big deal for a wealthy person, but devastating for a poor person. Why shouldn’t the wealthy persons fine be equally devastating? $2000, $20000, $200000, maybe $200,000,000 for Jeff Bezos.

Some places do this! Here’s a 54000 euro speeding ticket in Finland [1]:

> Finland's speeding fines are linked to income, with penalties calculated on daily earnings, meaning high earners get hit with bigger penalties for breaking the law. So, when businessman Reima Kuisla was caught doing 103km/h (64mph) in an area where the speed limit is 80km/h (50mph), authorities turned to his 2013 tax return, the Iltalehti newspaper reports. He earned 6.5m euros (£4.72m) that year, so was told to hand over 54,000 euros.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-31709454

See, this is what I'm talking about. The government (whether state or federal) already knows how much a person makes from their tax returns. If a person doesn't have a tax return, give them the lowest fine possible.

You're saying that in cases where the penalty is monetary, the punishment should fit the criminal rather than fitting the crime.

I think you should consider some of the ethical implications of imposing vastly different punishments for the same behavior.

I think a question is: is the same dollar amount the same punishment? Jeff Bezos doesn’t need to think twice about a $10k fine but there are plenty of people for whom that would be ruinous. Arguably, the “sameness” has to do with the impact of the fine, not the amount.

Well no, the punishment should fit the crime. It's just that punishing a poor person by taking $1000 could kill them, and punishing a rich person by taking $1000 is barely even a punishment.

Given progressive taxation, it already takes higher income persons more pre-tax income to come up with $1000 post-tax.

The punishment is $1000. 2nd order consequences, while possibly serious, aren't part of the punishment.

These "2nd order consequences" are the whole point of punishment. Money is only means of delivering them.

That's the same as tying the consequences a person faces for a crime to their wealth (given how predictable the severity of these "2nd order consequences" are!) and that is, to me, terribly unjust.

> That's the same as tying the consequences a person faces for a crime to their wealth (given how predictable the severity of these "2nd order consequences" are!)

I would actually say it's the opposite.

If you punish everyone with the same fine, their wealth is divorced from the punishment.

If you punish each person depending on their wealth, the punishment is directly proportional to their wealth.

In saying that, very poor people are definitely disproportionately affected by equal punishment. Though you could also say poor people would be more motivated to commit crimes if the punishment was proportional, since they stand to gain a lot more than a rich person.

I don't think there's a right answer.

> I think you should consider some of the ethical implications of imposing vastly different punishments for the same behavior.

You wouldn't, you'd impose the same punishment on everyone, e.g. 1% of net worth.

Rich people being a nuisance while piling up petty fines usually isn’t an issue because repeat offenses have escalating fines, loss of drivers license, or jail time.

This is extremely unjust. Just because someone produces more value for society (works harder, is more intelligent, and is therefore more useful to their fellow humans and thus gets higher compensation) shouldn't mean that society takes more from them when they break the same laws as everyone else. A poor person speeding and a rich person speeding are both creating the same negative externality and should compensate society by the same.

Consider that a poorer person's life could be devastated by just a few offences. While a very rich person never bothers to ever consider laws as they can easily buy their way out of nearly all of them thousands of times over.

That should probably be priced in relative to their ability to buy get-out-of-jail cards.

Edit: buy, not 'but'

> While a very rich person never bothers to ever consider laws as they can easily buy their way out of nearly all of them thousands of times over.

In reality, rich people have lower actual crime rates than poor people. Compliance with the law is as much a financial rounding error as fines. The police in rich neighborhoods have easier jobs. Your typical rich person isn’t going around making a nuisance of himself. Even John DuPont kept his behavior on his own property.

Is it really a lower crime rate or that less are reported against them? If so it could be due to their crimes being more white collar and complex, or because they can buy silence/settlement.

It really is lower. Not just from basic crime reports, but other ways of measuring like population surveys of victims. Nonscientifically, my feeling is that the median rates of finable crimes are about the same (~0) but all the people that can't help but go around and rack up infractions are usually bad at holding down a job, too, so they're less often rich, unless they're a successful misfit. Like, Marco Rubio comes to mind, he got a lot of speeding tickets. And two guys I know who are somewhat successful startup founders seem to have expressed the notion that getting pulled over is something that you expect to happen a lot, and I can't imagine them enjoying life in middle management.

The actual dividing line in terms of wealth and avoiding fines is more like people who are broke but sensible, versus people who have an income.

Should someone that dreads prison (say, they are physically weak, or have an anxiety disorder) be given less prison time than someone who is more comfortable there? I think we all recognize that this would be unjust, and I think the same reasoning applies to financial penalties.

If a poorer person (say, someone that works 6 hours a day at Walmart) and a richer person (say, someone that works 12 hours a day at Walmart) both steal $10,000 from someone, they have both caused the same amount of damage to the harmed individual. That is, they caused $10,000+moral damages (let's say $20,000 total damage). Why should the person that slaved harder and provided more value to society fork out more when they caused the same damage as a poorer person? If anything, the poorer person should pay more as recompense for being less useful to their fellow humans and broader society in aggregate. Of course money isn't the perfect proxy for societal value add but it's the best we have, especially in the context of a strong rule of law which will punish fraud etc.

It's not about justice, it's about pragmatic deterrents.

$200,000,000 is really not going to be noticeable to Bezos.

You can't be serious, his wealth is likely all tied up in stock and investments. Does even the richest person in the world have a cool 1 bil just sat in the bank? In that case it's very noticeable to have 1/5 your balance vanish.

Of course it’s in investments.

There is no bank account of cash involved.

But $200M is less than .2% of his wealth.

It’s not even 10% of the annual growth in his wealth.

Bezos can write a check for $200,000,000 today and his bankers will cover it.

He can spend $1,000,000 to pay Goldman Sachs to leverage his investments to most efficiently cover just that one check’s cash value, and not even notice it.

The challenge with scaling it is that many criminal defendants have no regular income and extremely little wealth, so any nonzero amount of bail is impossible for them to pay on their own.

How should negative net worth and/or no income be handled?