Home » More on sliding scales for traffic fines: good or bad idea?

Comments

More on sliding scales for traffic fines: good or bad idea? — 11 Comments

  1. As Alfred Doolittle said,

    “But, my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. Heh, I don’t need LESS than a deserving man, I need MORE. I don’t eat less hearty than he does, and I drink… oh, a lot more.”

  2. I think you see where this is going. Why limit this to speeding tickets? There’s really no reason. Let’s have differential fines for everything, differential tolls, and differential prices for goods. Why should a poor person pay as much for eggs as a rich person? After all, the poor person has to eat. That’s far more important than the right to speed. And rich people can afford to eat more meat; perhaps we should have a rationing system to make the consumption of meat more equal.
    ==
    Speeding tickets are an imposition by the state on members of the public. They’re a penalty. Whether sliding-scale tickets are an advisable idea or not, they are not a price for goods or for services rendered.
    ==
    Prices economize on information. You can seldom improve on price setting by vendors (or, in lieu of that, negotiation between buyers and sellers) as a means of regulating what is produced and how much is produced. Quite a bit of literature in microeconomics on the topic.
    ==
    You’re concerned about the well-being of impecunious people, you should consider income transfer programs. Their additional income in such a scheme will be allocated according to their extant household utility function, and that differs from household to household. The only anxiety here is if they have an immoderate appetite for vice goods.
    ==
    Sectoral subsidies in the realm of medical care, long-term care, schooling, legal services, and shipping-and-transportation one should consider. Even in these circumstances, there are trade-offs.

  3. Well, I’m honored to have been picked up (or on?)!

    Thank you for taking the argument seriously enough to actually collect data, which to be honest never occurred to me. (I believe I have had all of two speeding tickets in over 30 years behind steering wheels.)

    Of course, punishment is said to have multiple main objects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment#Possible_reasons_for_punishment):

    1) deterrence – OK, we see that the data does not really support a differential effect of sliding scales
    2) rehabilitation – irrelevant here
    3) incapacitation – also irrelevant
    4) retribution – and this is a little more relevant, because it’s exactly that a “normal” fine won’t hurt those Nokia executives
    5) restoration – irrelevant

    Yes, I do get that having rich people pay more in fines sounds a lot like “sock it to the plutocrats”, which I am no fan of. But even without a deterrence effect, I would say that fining reckless drivers (and yes, someone doing 290 km/h in Switzerland, where the Autobahns have a speed limit of 120 km/h, IS reckless) should impose pain. And per above, if you want to impose pain through monetary fines, there is no way around the fact that people’s financial situation differs so vastly that a single fine will be a joke to one person, but a major calamity to another one – so here is another argument, beyond deterrence, for sliding scales of traffic fines. (And lots of countries use that “day fine” system, e.g., Germany, just not all for traffic violations, but for other misdemeanors or crimes.)

    Funnily enough, as a European I always have the impression that the retributive aspect of punishment resonates most with Americans, much more than, say, rehabilitation 😉

  4. Gorgasal:

    Please read Thomas Sowell’s book The Quest for Cosmic Justice, It is a masterpiece. Sowell maintains, among other things, that cosmic justice fans are uninterested in evidence and would much rather virtue-signal.

    I am not saying you are uninterested in evidence. But you are certainly less interested in it than I am, if you didn’t think to seek any.

    Americans are very interested in rehabilitation. I certainly am. I was a sociology major for a while and then switched to psychology, and have a law degree and an interest in criminal law. But I am also interested in punishmen and deterrence, and I believe the problem with rehabilitation is that I don’t think we know enough about how to achieve it.

    I took your argument seriously because it’s the best argument for these sliding scales for speeding. I happen to strongly disagree with it, however.
    .

  5. There is a very easy way to eliminate the economic factor from the issue: eliminate fines and replace them with incarceration. Rich or poor, same punishment. Perhaps some “community service” for a first offense, then increasing time in the slammer for recidivists. Problem solved.

  6. Wish I could remember where I heard it. “Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn’t any fun.”
    Not true at all. Backwards.

    As it happens, most jurisdictions have a speed limit above which one is “speeding”. That has an upper bound. Beyond that, it’s “reckless” and the penalties are far more severe, as they should be, since the risk to others is much higher. “reckless” includes more than speed above the “speeding” upper bound and all the other stuff like crazy lane changes and so forth.

    Talked to a couple of cops over the years and they say that, when on traffic duty, “reckless” is their favorite stop because they HATE it when they have to pick up after a “reckless” causes a tragedy. Speeding…meh, but it gives them a chance to look at ID, insurance, so forth and, once in a while find somebody who needs to be picked up for…something else.

  7. Americans are very interested in rehabilitation
    ==
    Which Americans?
    ==
    (Personally, I’m happy to let age and a dislike of discomforts to do the rehabilitating).

  8. How about skip all fines and just go back to the points system.

    “You have one point left on your license.”

  9. How about skip all fines and just go back to the points system.
    ==
    In which state was one present without the other?

  10. I’m surprised that no one has pointed out the way some municipalities use speeding tickets as a funding mechanism by having “speed traps”: abrupt or unexpected changes in the speed limit along a part of the road continuously monitored by police, or sections where the tendency for one’s speed to creep up is geographically facilitated.
    Why, I’m surprised they haven’t used the variable fines system before!

    Granted, my knowledge may be out of date, and they may be obsolete in most jurisdictions, but they were a big feature of moderate-to-small towns in Texas in the past.
    One notorious trap was on the highway running south from Houston.
    A little town incorporated itself so that it’s jurisdiction extended across the highway in a series of “fingers” about a mile or two wide, separated by about the same distance. So, as you drove, the speed limit dropped from 70 to 55, went back to 70, then dropped to 55 again, and so forth. Even if you knew that was happening, it was hard to keep alert to the changes. If you were not familiar with the area, you were almost certainly going to get caught speeding across one or more of the fingers. (This was pre-GPS days, where you had a map showing the speed limit, but even so they would have been hard to adjust to.)

    Eventually, the state made the city quit doing it.

    https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/what-is-a-speed-trap/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>