But it didn't cost $22,000. If he didn't go to a jail would the city save $22k?
The city lost $215,000,000 in revenue due to the fare evasion.
The city lost $215,000,000 in revenue due to the fare evasion.
The people who don’t pay likely don’t have the money in the first place or are drunk. It’s unlikely they would have paid any ways.
You're also not allowed to bring your own lunch to eat in the cafeteria, but that system can work out okay when you have dedicated chefs at each school, and cheap good cheese (and funding for... children to eat... a bizarre concept in some parts of the world).
Could some families afford the cost and time of providing a better 2-4 course lunch every day? Sure, but most won’t.
This is why, for the first 4 years of school, I went to a specialized school for physically and mentally disabled children. I was not really disabled (besides allergies and asthma), but that was the only school where the cafeteria personnel was able/willing to accommodate my needs. (My grandmother brought in precooked food for me for the next day when she picked me up from school.) When I changed to secondary school, my parents employed some legal tricks to get me into a school close to my grandmother's apartment, so I could go to her place for lunch.
I realize that I was an edge case. But I sure hope that the laws governing those French kids accommodate their edge cases.
France gets a big fail on this one. It's incredibly difficult to completely dis-own your children in your will.
I disagree with this assertion. If everyone knows the rules of the game, there will be plenty of guesswork as to how much whom is paying. "Just" a swipe of the card does not make social inequality evaporate. And, in my personal experience, this leads to more prejudice, not less. To me, this screams oversimplification by the state (or whoever is responsible for making school lunches "politically correct").
There’s little difference between this system and a system of direct payments to address the inequality.
This system also eliminates the potential of the family squandering any direct payments.
I never really understood the whole "Free if your parents aren't rich" mentality. Parents of rich kids pay more tax so why not give them free lunches as well since they pay for it indirectly anyway? Reduces bureaucracy. We do that in Sweden. The same thing can be said about most things, like higher education, healthcare etc.
http://web.mta.info/nyct/rules/TransitAdjudicationBureau/rul...
Who knows what percentage of those are paid.
But relative to the size of the problem that’s a pittance.
Was on the train here in Houston yesterday, and this very topic came up as some folks were chatting with a transit officer onboard. Some said they'd always sit in jail rather than pay a fine.
So I guess this is more of a belief in the value of work thing. Which is OK, but I think this would have more value if we could then offer offenders a chance to continue to clean and then earn money, but we don't have jobs to offer them after we made up this cleaning one as a punishment.
Eg If you knew that there was a 99% chance that you'd be fined every time for minor traffic offenses (going 5k over the speed limit, failure to indicate, etc) then the fine could be $20 and nobody would do it. Instead the fine is much higher but only a small proportion are caught.
It also works for major offenses. Longer jail sentences don't deter crime as much as the likelihood of being caught.