This is exactly why fines ought to scale with the offender’s income, e.g. the €120k speeding ticket given to a millionaire in Finland [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...

For individuals, maybe that works.

For a building company getting ready to add on several million dollars worth of floor space, you can bet that they will engineer their books so if they have little to no income.

They do that already for income taxes....

For property I might mildly suggest basing fines off the property tax.

Don't fine them, just take ownership of the illegal portion of the construction.

The city can sublet it, the developer derives zero revenue.

On the other hand, there is an "equality before the law" point worth making.

Precedent being an odd mother, the capacity to morph violations into stealth taxation might not be a power one wants to grant to a government.

What's not equal about applying the same percentage? No matter your means, the fines are the same percentage, which to me is pretty danged equal when the point is to punish certain behaviours.

Same problem as a national VAT: turning the tax base into an ATM empowers myopic polixy.

Wouldn't it be more like a VAT where you pay based on your means, not what the product costs?

That and I don't really have a problem with making the rich the country's piggybank.

You'll not have a problem until the rich eject, take their wealth with them, and crash the tax base.

See: NY, CA, &c.

Make it federal, and have a steep 'exit penalty' for renouncing citizenship if you're over a certain wealth threshold. Make it so that if you try to renounce your citizenship to avoid the taxes, you're left to start from zero again, and if you don't renounce your citizenship, you owe the taxes no matter where in the world you are (and in most of the world, Uncle Sam can absolutely get to you if he wants.)

As a personal example, I left the military reserve because, inter alia, the joy of serving my country mattered less than the tax beating I was taking for being bumped into a higher bracket.

That is: (dis)incentives matter.

Maybe we can agree that our tax system is a Byzantine train wreck in need of reform.

Well then if applying the same percentage is a principle, how about we apply it to taxes?

If taxes were applied based on total wealth and not income, the two would be comparable. But the taxes you're talking about, income taxes, aren't taxing wealth but the rate of change of wealth, and I can accept that we need to apply slightly different principles in that case.

and prison terms should be in proportion to life expectancy. 15 years for arson if committed by a 20 yr old, and 2.5 if committed by a 70 year old. makes sense to me. oh wait ...