But that makes wildly different incentives to enforce, depending on the target. We all know this stuff is all about revenue enhancement, and in that capacity, the targets will become the whales.

Automated enforcement where fines are anchored to the KBB value of the car is The Way

Enlightenment and utopia across that simple bridge

Devil's advocate: billionaire driving a beater (I'm not a billionaire, but I drive a beater)

Good for them. I’m willing to let them off easy to incentivize lower cost cars in general.

I am 100% fine with them "sneaking under the radar." Own goal.

Or how about the curb weight of the car? Higher mass means you're doing a lot more damage in an accident. People might think twice about buying an F250 for their grocery getter.

I'm fine with that as the tax basis but for penalties, this doesn't actually track with what's needed to produce deterrent at every income level

X% of net worth is still a bigger deal to someone with a net worth of $20 than to someone with a net worth of $20M, even though the latter may get some sticker shock. And it's possible (if rare) to have a reasonably middle-class lifestyle and an actually negative net worth. Presumably you would not make it possible to pay off student loans by repeatedly violating a red light, although it would be very funny.

> Presumably you would not make it possible to pay off student loans by repeatedly violating a red light

I lack the context and knowledge to understand how this would work, but I am curious (enough to ask but not enough to google it, admittedly).

The joke being that if your net worth is negative the fine will be negative.

Man, I missed that by a mile. Thanks. :D

You’d be surprised at the numbers of people living middle-class lifestyles with negative net worth. Credit card debt, car loans (with a too-small down payment, a car purchase can easily cause one’s net worth to decline the second you take delivery on the car), underwater mortgages, not to mention student loans.

A car purchase should mean the car counts towards your new net worth. So if it makes your net worth negative you either had almost none to begin with or paid much more for the car than it is worth.

> I don't like paltry sums like this. $300 is a significant financial impact to someone who's barely making ends meet, and absolutely nothing at all to a billionaire.

One thing about daycares is that you will essentially never find "someone who's barely making ends meet" and "a billionaire" with kids at the same daycare, so a surcharge for out-of-normal-expectations service does not need to be designed to address both cases.

(In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare, their hired childcare workers won't be shared with other people, and will probably be adequately compensated up front in a way which anticipates a fair degree of schedule variability.)

OTOH, with red light cameras, you also don't need to scale the fine to work with both, because the entire purpose is to bind the lower classes while exempting the upper from any substantial burden. (The least cynical explanation is that it is to discourage behavior which might incur liability grossly exceeding the mandatory level of insurance company by those least able to cover the cost of that liability, thereby avoiding uncompensated harms, but the realistic explanation is...not so generous.)

> In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare

I grew up with the children of a multi-billionaire. His kids went to the same daycare as I did, and it wasn’t particularly fancy.

Some ultra-wealthy people live fairly normal-looking lives.

Something I heard from someone who worked at the Palo Alto Apple Store two decades ago:

Steve Jobs's kids drew on an eMac with markers or something. He made them make an appoint for the store's Genius Bar and wait in line to have it looked at like everyone else. I don't know anything about how the staff tried to clean it or the outcome.