Punishment via fines should be entirely replaced with something more generally equitable: time. $60 parking ticket should be replaced with 1 hour of community service, which (mostly) equally "inconveniences" a blue collar worker and CEO alike. Same scheme should apply to corporate crimes as well... when everybody's least favorite mega-bank gets caught defrauding customers, don't fine them, sentence the company to 1000 hours of community service, meaning every employee on the payroll has to do 1000 hours of community service and the company has to pay them their standard wages while doing it. That kind of loss would definitely change some board room attitudes.

In Finland, it is tied to your income. No idea if that actually helps change behavior or not.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t...

It's everyone not just poor people, I suspect it's mostly poor people that pay the tax now because the behavior incentive mostly worked. There's a selection bias here in part, people more responsive to not wasting money are going to be more responsive to higher costs - they're also less likely to be poor as a result of this.

Parking is different enough to not to be comparable. You don't die a horrible death from parking.

> If your incentive isn’t pegged to income or wealth, it’s just creating two tiers of society

I don't agree with this, but it's a longer discussion and mostly off topic. You create more issues by doing this than you fix imo. "Poor" is not a permanent state.

Arguably if what you're suggesting was the case we'd see rich people smoking because the tax doesn't impact them and poor people abstaining due to cost. We don't see that so it suggests something else is going on.

> You don't die a horrible death from parking.

You do die a horrible death from eviction because you had to choose between getting a warrant issued due to unpaid parking tickets, or paying rent. Money is a zero-sum game.

> "Poor" is not a permanent state.

Statistically it basically is, but as you say that's another topic. Either way it doesn't matter, because if I am poor now and you slap me with a parking fine that's 0.4% of my income, I'm going to suffer. While that SAME fine isn't going to have an impact on the quality of life of someone making just 2x what I'm making.

> we'd see rich people smoking because the tax doesn't impact them

Yes. This is why I don't believe that the tax had anything to do with reducing smoking rates. I think people stopped smoking because they realized they were going to die from cancer, not because it got expensive.

Meanwhile, 10% of households are DEEPLY effected by this, some of them to the point of maybe staying in poverty due to smoking.

You DO see very rich people ignoring fines because it doesn't cost them an appreciable amount:

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/jeff-bez...

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...

> "You do die a horrible death from eviction because you had to choose between getting a warrant issued due to unpaid parking tickets, or paying rent."

What I meant was fines for parking seem less socially important than fines for smoking.

I think policy that protects the lower bound from getting crippled by cascading fines is probably good - at least it's where I think the focus should be. I think we agree more than disagree on that probably.

It's expanding the cost to be more extreme at all levels that I think is a bad idea.

In your two examples the Steve one doesn't really apply. CA didn't used to require plates on new cars (they do now) and he had cancer.

The Bezos example sounds real, but also not personal? More of an "I'll cover your parking tickets" so the contractors don't get hit with them (which seems if anything like he's helping avoid those that would get hit harder by fines). That doesn't bother me too much - I guess I view a fine as an acceptable trade to discourage behavior, but if you're willing to pay it then you can.

Is that unfair because it's worse if you're poor? Yeah, but a lot of things are worse if you're poor. I don't think being poor should be the same as not being poor, but it should be bounded. I'd argue the lower bound in American society today is too low.

In the parking ticket case I think it's interesting and not clear-cut b/c on one hand you have the "treat all equal before the law" and on the other hand you have desired outcomes.

It's hard for me ethically not to fall on the side of treating everyone equally under the law versus trying for specific outcomes. If you wanted to go for outcomes can you help me distinguish why you wouldn't sentence a poor person to lesser jail time or insurance payout (car wreck) or w/e lesser amount than a rich person? Does a wealthy person have more to lose by murdering someone? Less? I just don't think it's clear cut but for my part I'm definitely open minded on it. It's kind of the equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes thing - I'm definitely on the equality of opportunity camp with probably a base versus equality of outcome.

"treat all equal before the law" could easily mean a fine that has an equal impact. Is it really equal treatment to fine someone in a way that jeopardizes their ability to pay rent and fine someone else in a way that annoys them slightly?

Idk. Is it? I don’t think there is a clear cut answer. Should the poor serve shorter jail terms since they make less money and therefore have less time post-jail to accumulate lost earnings?

The solution to that is to make them pay in person after waiting in line for an hour. An hours time to the guy making $150K is worth much more than any flat fine.

If you make a poor person drive down to the DMV and wait in line to pay a fine they will likely loose a day of work (which they cannot afford to lose) or perhaps even their job entirely (can't make your shift? Sorry, don't come back to work). A richer person will lose some money, but on the other end they will still be essentially where they were when they started.

Not to mention the side-industry of "DMV line placeholders" that would immediately pop up.

Poverty is itself supposed to be an incentive. The reason we have a market-based exchange economy is to incentivize people to a.) work b.) for more productive firms that can pay you more and c.) innovate to create even more productive firms.

That people view their station in life as fixed and their success outcomes as binary (either poverty or a $150K/year job) indicates that something has gone seriously wrong with capitalism. Which may very well be true - I think a lot of people would say that something has gone seriously wrong with capitalism. But the solution to that is to fix the root cause that divides people into castes, not make things cheaper for the lower caste.

I was actually suggesting we make things more expensive for the upper class, but same-same ;)

Let me ask you this. What if fines are what dividing people into castes? The fees around court and jail in the US are a great example of this. If you get sent to jail or taken to court for any kind of infraction, the fees around it can cripple you financially for YEARS. Tho if you have a spare 50k laying around you can make them all go away. I think there are many cases outside of the criminal legal system where this is also real.

So I'll start with how it's supposed to work and then acknowledge that it's oftentimes not how it does work in practice.

Ideally, you're supposed to avoid high court fees & fines by not doing criminal things. Avoid the court system and you will never have to pay court fees. And if you do end up with a $50K judgment, you're supposed to go work productively and convince someone to pay you $50K for work that's worth more to them than $50K. Thus you have paid your debt to society - you did something bad, but if you do other good things that people find valuable, that debt is wiped out. In theory at least, someone with $50K in his pocket got it by doing things that a lot of people found valuable, enough that they were willing to pay $50K for it.

Now, I know it doesn't always work that way. Someone could find themselves in the court system not because they did something bad, but because they're black and were standing on the wrong street corner. We shouldn't do that. And sometimes whole behaviors that are normal in one disadvantaged culture (smoking weed, for example) get criminalized precisely because the person in power wants to jail lots of people. The person who did that should've been put in jail himself, but Gerald Ford pardoned him. This is also contingent upon people having money because they did things of value that other people found worthwhile enough to pay them for, which also isn't a given today. We should fix that too, although I think that a lot of people's reaction against wealth is because they can't wrap their heads around how many people a billion users is or how much value they derive from everyday activities provided by a large corporation.

But assuming that things are broken but we're going to slap a band-aid on the one specific instance that's in front of us today risks entrenching the brokenness. Say that you do create lower fees and fines for poorer people. Aren't you now incentivizing criminal behavior, as the costs for it are less? And won't those societal costs be born primarily by the people around them, who are usually other poor people that now have to live with the consequences?

It seems backwards to me to take the bad situation that exists and make it worse to cripple more people?

I generally agree that at the lower bound there the cascading effect of penalties can be disproportionate and extreme, things like ending cash bail can be a way to improve this (though I'm not a policy expert). Making it similarly extreme for everyone seems bad? It also creates a disincentive for making money which seems like the opposite of what you want.

Our choices are:

1) keep the current system (fixed fines) 2) proportional fines (higher fines for wealthier violators) 3) abandon penalty fines entirely for another system

For most cases I'd like to see #3, since I think fines are basically a bad system of social control. However, there are going to be cases where we want to keep fines there - and for those cases #1 continues to enforce class structures, while #2 applies pressure evenly across class.

Also, sorry, I don't accept that last point. Nobody is going to stop making money because their parking tickets go up in cost. That's not how people work.

I think there are more options available.

I'd be partial to keep fines, but protect the lower bound from cascading failure.

> "Nobody is going to stop making money because their parking tickets go up in cost. That's not how people work."

There is evidence already of incentives changing behavior with the recent stimulus. I think it is how people work.

There is popular consensus that stimulus has change behavior. There’s very little evidence that is actually the case.