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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

If one person gets their life savings cleared out for a $100 speeding fine, how do you equate that financial pain to Bill Gates? Why should Bill Gates be punished more in the same situation for having put the work in to build a successful company?

You end up with silly (IMHO) situations like someone getting a $290k fine in Switzerland for 85mph in a 50 zone.

6 months in jail for someone who can't afford a $1k bail is the other end of the scale though - surely it cost substantially more than that to keep him in there. I'm pretty certain in the UK we have charities that help people out in such situations, is there no equivalent provision in the US?

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> If one person gets their life savings cleared out for a $100 speeding fine, how do you equate that financial pain to Bill Gates? Why should Bill Gates be punished more in the same situation for having put the work in to build a successful company?

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.

> The ultimate goal is not to collect $100, it's for the offender to not reoffend.

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 discussion is about bails which are given back if you show up to court.

It seems to me that the discussion diverged quite a bit from the original posting.

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.

He's not punished "more", he's punished equitably.

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.

The whole point of those Switzerland-style fines based on wealth are to make sure that Bill Gates is punished the _same_ amount for the same crime, not more. It's just using a different measure of "amount of punishment" - in this case something based on proportion of wealth/income rather than a flat amount. That flat amount means a lot less to Bill Gates than someone who has $100 in savings.

Having to rely on charities to fix problems in our justice system seems completely backwards to me. That's a workaround, not a solution.

So, if a $100 fine for someone with only $100 to their name is adjusted to punish Bill Gates the same amount... how much do you fine him? Every cent he has to his name? Because if you leave him with anything the punishment isn't the same.

And what if he then commits a much more serious offence?

I still think the whole concept is so flawed it's a farce.

To me it seems just as farcical to levy a $100 fine on someone who only has $100. What exactly does that accomplish?

Admin costs is an answer I've heard previously to having a non-zero lower end (i.e. an element of the fine that's not supposed to be punishment/deterrent).

So if a robbery results in a 10 year sentence and a poor person makes $15,000 per year, that means the sentence costs the poor person $150,000, not adjusted for inflation. A rich person who makes $1 million per year would he. Need to serve less than 2 months then right?

If we are trying to use this socialist fine system, then that would necessarily result in shorter jail time for rich people because they are being “harmed” more proportionally.

These scaled punishments are absurd.

You've got it backwards.

"time" is the unit of punishment, as it's more equal than wealth.

We agree that both a rich and poor person should serve the same time in prison for the same crime

Therefore, for a fine, both a rich and a poor person should pay the same fine relative to their earnings per unit of time. i.e., if the fine is $100 for someone making $15,000/year, it should be $100,000 for someone making $15,000,000/year

That's simple.

But what about someone making $150k a year with no assets vs. someone living in a $1.5m property with no job who made $15k last year on $150k of shares?

What about someone with $1.5m in shares who made a $15k loss on them last year? Do they get paid instead of fined?

The fine is based on x days of income in the last fiscal year, or perhaps an average over some years. It makes perfect sense.

Maybe the problem is at the low end and you shouldn’t find a person with $100, $100.

That seems a fairly reasonable fine to me - if the speeder has "annual income of more than $820,000 and is worth well over $20 million" then why shouldn't he pay more?

Also:

"The Testarossa driver was initially fined a little less than $90,000 by the local jurisdiction. That was raised to $145,000 by the next court after the driver claimed diplomatic immunity, saying he is diplomat from the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. That didn't sway the court, which boosted the fine to $290,000."

https://www.wired.com/2010/01/record-speeding-fine-dents-swi...

That seems a fairly reasonable fine to me - if the speeder has "annual income of more than $820,000 and is worth well over $20 million" then why shouldn't he pay more?

Because his income isn't anything to do with the offence.

But the goal is presumably to try and persuade him not to speed again?

The goal should be to persuade everyone not to speed in the first place.

you keep talking in dollars and not hours

if the fine is "one week of income" and you don't want to lose a week then you won't speed

if a speeding ticket was 5 cents everyone would speed every day... and this is the status quo for the rich since the fine is to their income what five cents is to most others

so we fine people enough that it affects them in a proportionate way to make the likelihood of changing their behavior equal, rather than only changing the behavior of the poor

Dollars is roughly proportional to hours for the guy at the bottom of income levels. I'm not sure it is for people at the top, choosing which assets to liquidate in which year.

How do you persuade “everyone” when the primary deterrent is a fixed fine that doesn’t scale relative to lifestyle?

So now we're not looking at fines in relation to income but lifestyle?

I just think you cannot scale fines in relation to income/lifestyle/anything else financially. You can scale it, but you can't hit people with different incomes, assets, etc. in the same fashion, which ultimately smells of a bad system to me.

So what would you recommend?

Anything else.

The points system seems sufficent to me for most driving offences, beyond costs. But community service, prison time, curfews, anything which is equivalent and not open to manipulation.

I wonder of all of the options what the speeder would have chosen - I suspect he would pay the money and move on.

How would that even make a difference?

This statement does not support the argument that you were making in the first place

>I'm pretty certain in the UK we have charities that help people out in such situations

We rarely use financial bail conditions except in the most serious cases. Financial conditions are mainly used where a) there are grounds to believe that the defendant has substantial funds at their disposal and b) there are grounds to believe that the defendant has a significant risk of absconding. It's a likely option if you're accused of robbing a bank or running a major drug dealing operation, but it's far from the default option.

If you're bailed, there will be conditions attached to mitigate the particular risks in your case. You might be required to report to a police station every week or every day to confirm that you're complying with your bail requirements. You might be placed under curfew with an electronic tag. You might be forbidden from going to certain places or speaking to certain people. You might have to surrender your passport. You might be required to live in a bail hostel. The court has to demonstrate that those conditions are proportionate and necessary, and you have the right to appeal their decision.

> Why should Bill Gates be punished more in the same situation for having put the work in to build a successful company?

This would make people equal in front of the law.

Why would being wealthy allow you to break the law more often with less consequences on your wellbeing? See the example of Harvey Weinstein in the article. The dude is rich, so he can get away with it. What do you think of that?

A $50 ticket is not going to deter bill gates from speeding.

The goal of a speeding ticket is not to collect $50, it is to save lives by detering people from speeding..

"The goal of a speeding ticket is not to collect $50, it is to save lives by detering people from speeding.."

It was once, maybe. I wonder how many people are actually turned from minor offenders into full criminals by the current law/jail system. To me it looks like the goal is to operate an artificial selection on the human species to encourage those who help the economy more. That is, legalized Eugenics.

I think the goal of private prisons is to make more money (which is easier when spending less money and keeping prisoners longer, which also makes them more likely to re-offend), and the goal of politicians is to appear tough on crime and respond to lobbying (by private prisons).

Or something like that, anyway. Alignment of petty individual goals usually makes more sense than grand conspiracies.

I have gotten exactly 1 speeding ticket in my life.

It was for $200 in highschool and it stung.

If i got that same speeding ticket now, it would not sting nearly as much, and i would probably be over it by the time i went to work the next morning.

A $50 ticket is not going to deter bill gates from speeding.

Of course. But I don't think we can sensibly, or ethically, charge him an amount that would. How much would deter him to the same degree? $1m probably wouldn't cut it either.

Instead, surely we should either accept that and charge everyone the same absolute amount or find other more equitable ways of deterring him. License points, driving bans, community service, prison time, anything that isn't just taking obscene amounts of money simply because the guy has worked smart and earns more.

all of those other things you listed are already in place and cost people time & dignity (which enough money can offset the cost of)

It needs to sting for everyone, not just the poor.

Do you reject higher tax brackets for the wealthy under that same line of reasoning?

Surely wealth is an important factor in deciding what people owe to society

Use those other things for punishment then, don't sting them additionally just because they're wealthier (or rather, have a higher income).

Getting off track here, but I'd rather there were as few tax rates as practical. Perhaps even one under a basic income system. Then the rate is upfront, clear and honest. Not a compounding system of stealth taxes.

Worth noting that wealth is not the same as income, but we tend to tax income rather than wealth, at least until death.

Same reason companies are punished for some crimes as a percentage of their value.

If flushing toxic waste to a river always resulted in constant fine - for rich companies with big enough waste treatment bills it would be rational (cheaper) to do it and pay the fines.

In Finland, speeding fines are income based to make sure they sting enough to get the drivers to change their habits. It's a bit moot with Gates (he takes a car to a racetrack if he feels like speeding) but it sure would be a useful thing for areas with too many Beemer drivers.

If you were looking at fine as a price to pay to break the law, then yes, it's silly. But the fine should make you not want to break the law in the first place. Then math is completely different.

If you do a bit of searching, you can find a mug shot of the very young Bill Gates, I think from Microsoft's New Mexico days.

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