
A Billionaire and a Nurse Shouldn't Pay the Same Fine for Speeding - rafaelc
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/opinion/flat-fines-wealthy-poor.html
======
cousin_it
Tiny brain: We should punish Zuckerberg for speeding! That'll show him!

Normal brain: Wait a minute. Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1%
of the speeding problem. Okay, the 1% number is polemical, but any solution to
the problem of speeding must fall mostly on poorer people, because they are
the majority.

Glowing brain: Why do we talk about speeding as a crime? Any economist would
tell you that the optimal amount of speeding is nonzero, so it should be
solved with a Pigovian tax equal to the negative externality. Since a rich
speeding person does as much potential damage as a poor speeding person, the
fine shouldn't depend on how rich you are. If you want a safety net, build a
safety net, don't muck around with speeding fines.

Galactic brain: Is speeding that much of an externality though? If you go fast
and cause a crash, you bear about half of the cost. If you don't cause a
crash, no one bears the cost. It's not like pollution where the polluter bears
a millionth of the cost. So it seems like selfish decision making, with
average human level of loss aversion, should already deal with the problem of
speeding. Why isn't that happening?

Buddha brain: People know the cost of a crash. Speeding happens because people
misjudge the risk of a crash. So perceived risk, not cost, is the right
variable to tweak if you want to fix speeding. Make enforcement of fines much
more fast and certain, and you can solve speeding while lowering fines. The
whole article about billionaires was a distraction from a distraction from a
distraction.

~~~
bryanlarsen
"Make enforcement of fines much more fast and certain, and you can solve
speeding while lowering fines."

If "solve" means legitimize it, yes, you've solved it.

Google for "daycare fine study" and notice that adding a small but significant
fine to a behaviour you wish to discourage _increased_ that behaviour rather
than decreasing it.

~~~
cousin_it
The fine shouldn't be that low. Here's the best formula I could figure out.

Let's say R1 = actual risk of harm to yourself and others, M1 = magnitude of
harm to yourself and others, R2 = your perceived risk of harm to yourself, M2
= magnitude of harm to yourself. Both M1 and M2 should be based on market
price of QALY (about 50K dollars?) without overvaluing you specifically. Then
the fine should be set at R1⋅M1-R2⋅M2.

That's a generalization of Pigovian tax to a spectrum of behaviors: pollution
(R1=R2, M1>M2), skipping medical checkups (R1>R2, M1=M2), speeding (R1>R2,
M1>M2). Does that make sense?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Given that speeders more often harm themselves than others, your equation
gives a negative answer.

~~~
cousin_it
M1 includes harm to yourself.

------
caseysoftware
This seems like backdoor civil asset forfeiture but it would allow them to
take assets that aren't even present and/or involved at the time of the
"offense".

Can you see a particularly cash-strapped town telling officers to skip the
Toyota Camrys and instead pull over the BMWs? It seems ideal for abuse,
selective law enforcement, and likely other bad behaviors.

Oddly enough, this would likely go away with self-driving cars as high income
people switch to vehicles who "can't" break the law.

~~~
oblio
Are you really worried that _rich people_ are the ones that can’t protect
themselves from abuse? :)

~~~
edanm
Not as much as _poor_ people, sure, but keep in mind that even rich people are
much less powerful than governments or even large amounts of people.

I mean, obviously a completely different scenario, but, how many times have
revolutions killed all the rich/powerful people? They don't have infinite
protection just cause they're rich.

~~~
oblio
I'm from a country where that happened, I'm quite aware about this aspect.
Even so, fining rich people more just makes sense, to me. Fines are supposed
to be a deterrent.

If we're reaching the point where we're discussing about revolutions and civil
forfeiture, I think there's a bigger problem here. And it's not proportional
fines.

------
kosei
I think I'd take the other approach than exorbitant fines for the rich.
Perhaps they should grow (a $3,000 fine for a billionaire isn't unreasonable),
but the more important part IMO is here:

"For people living on the economic margins, even minor offenses can impose
crushing financial obligations, trapping them in a cycle of debt and
incarceration for nonpayment."

I think it is reasonable that a speeding ticket for someone earning minimum
wage could have a lower (say $50 instead of $150) penalty. The fines are made
to disincentivize behavior, not put people in debt.

~~~
deviationblue
> a $3,000 fine for a billionaire isn't unreasonable

This sounds ridiculous to me because the idea of laws, and by extension fines,
is that they apply uniformly, regardless of class, gender, whatever.

~~~
gnud
The laws should obviously apply equally. Exactly for that reason, fines should
not be the same for someone who earns $15/hr and $1500/hr. A fine of $150 is
10 hours of work for one person, and 6 minutes for the other. How is that
equal application of the law?

~~~
kingofhdds
The same logic (if applied consistently) would make judges give longer prison
sentences to younger, healthier individuals.

~~~
gnud
... if the only point of prison is punishment.

------
Osiris
Why not just do away with fines all together rather than trying to come up
with a complex system to try to make them fair. Perhaps instead of fines a
more appropriate punishment should be that you're forced to sit in your car
for an hour making you late to whatever you were in a rush for.

~~~
sebazzz
What about people who drive hard deliberate because they can afford the fines,
in their free time?

~~~
lox
In Australia we have a demerit point system, although technically if you have
enough money you can pay to get around it.

~~~
supreme_sublime
The United States has the same thing. Get too many traffic infractions in a
certain time window (a year or two, might depend on the state) and you get
your license revoked.

~~~
mrguyorama
Certain states allow you to pay double the fine and ignore the points. This
was used by groups[0] doing road rallies across America.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1nstSui0tPnJtMF2OZx5tw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1nstSui0tPnJtMF2OZx5tw)

------
tbrownaw
Or just do away with the fines completely.

At least where I live, a speeding ticket knocks off a couple of your license's
12hp, and they take like a year to regenerate. Maybe that alone should be
enough, or maybe you should also have to sit there one extra minute for every
mph over the limit you were going.

~~~
empath75
Yeah, the fine is never the reason I get upset about being pulled over for
speeding. It was always the points on the license and the time spent waiting
for the ticket.

------
Yaggo
I'm from Finland where we have this kind of "relative fines". While I
generally agree with the concept, it should better take into account the
household's total income & wealth.

E.g. I could get a fine of 1/2 of my monthly net income for driving 140 km/h
(87 mph) on highway, which would hit hard our household (three kids, low
income spouse, no savings), although no real harm or risk was caused to
anyone.

~~~
lox
That sounds pretty reasonable to me, frankly. That’s considerably over the
limit, isn’t it?

~~~
paganel
The highway speed limit in a country like Romania is 130 kph, but you only
risk getting fined if you exceed 140. As such, I usually do 130-135 kph on the
highway in my small 1.4 l hatchback and I don’t feel unsafe at all. I feel
much more unsafe on 2-lane national roads with lots of curbs and where you
risk getting a horse-drawn carriage in front of you out of nowhere, even
though on those roads people usually drive much slower (the limit is 90, I
stick to 80-90 most of the times unless I have clear visibility for like one
km, in which case I push it to 100). Point is that it’s not the speed that
kills you, it’s NOT adapting the speed to the road’s conditions that does it.
As such, imposing draconian speed limits on highways (like in Finland) is very
counter-productive and frustrating, because those highways are actually built
to “support” higher speeds (just look at Germany).

------
boomlinde
_> But the United States doesn’t need to go that far._

I see reasons to go even further, if the goal is a fair level of deterrence.
If for a significant part of the population, the total wealth is less than or
in the same order of magnitude as the money they earned that month, while for
others, income is a relatively tiny portion of it, fines based on income alone
will deter the former much more than the latter. The more fair option would be
to fine based on wealth, not income.

Then, yet further, if you all you have is $500 and lose half of what you own,
that'll likely have a devastating effect, possibly resulting in homelessness.
For a billionaire, losing half your wealth leaves you with $500M. You won't
exactly be panhandling to make ends meet. Again, the deterrence is
disproportionate.

I'm not sure how to address it. Possibly by not using fines at all, but some
amount of hours of social work that has to be completed in some short but
manageable span of time, with the definition of "manageable" based on
individual circumstances.

------
laci27
On some of Italy's highways, they calculate the speeding ticket from gate to
gate:) Meaning that if you entered the highway at 12:00 and you exited at
13:00 at a gate 120 miles ahead, you get a fine.

Sometimes, I see people who like to speed, just sit it out at a parking cafe
next to their exit.

------
paulddraper
This is already true for incarceration; a billionaire and a nurse lose the
same amount of time. And one's time is paid more than the other's.

Speeding is a weird example though. If _I 'm_ driving I pay based on my
income, but if _my driver_ is driving he pays based on his?

> In 2015, it handed a businessman a $67,000 speeding ticket for going 14
> miles per hour above the limit.

I just don't see how going 14 mph with zero other damage is equivalent to
compensating the public $67k.

"Justice" is about balancing the action with its punishment, not gimmicks like
this (that inevitably wind up with a super-complex system of loopholes,
deductions, inefficiencies, etc.)

~~~
onion2k
_I just don 't see how going 14 mph with zero other damage is equivalent to
compensating the public $67k._

Speeding is a crime because you're risking the safety of other people. There's
only "zero damage" if you're lucky. There's potential for _a lot_ of damage.
Considering the defined punishment is supposed to act as a deterrent I would
argue $67k was actually too low.

~~~
stmfreak
There is only actual damage if you are exceptionally unlucky. Almost everyone
speeds to varying degrees, with wildly successful runs of luck.

Ergo, speeding is not a crime, it is an easy revenue target for greedy
municipalities with overpaid cops.

~~~
zaarn
Speeding is a crime since it is illegal by law. That the money goes to
municipalities is a problem of the US system, it should go to the
state/government.

The problem really isn't that you haven't caused damage, rather that you
ignored the _legal_ safety limits of the road just to get home a bit earlier
while completely ignoring or dismissing that in case of bad luck you could
have caused immense damage. Reckless behavior like that, where innocent third
parties can be immensely hurt or killed, should be punished.

In Germany, we have strict laws all about this. If you endanger the traffic or
any of the (potential) participants of the traffic, you get fined. It doesn't
matter if you say "but officer the road was completely empty", the driver is
rarely omnipresent to know everything happening on the next kilometer of road.

Accidents aren't predictable but preventable.

~~~
paulddraper
> It doesn't matter if you say "but officer the road was completely empty"

To be fair, road usage does matter.

If there is construction you will be fined more. If students traveling to
school, the speed limit is lowered.

Point being that not all "speeding" is the same.

~~~
zaarn
Obviously yes, if you have a higher probability of endangering someone (ie,
school kids, construction sites), the punishment will be worse.

------
anabis
At lease some kind of mention of equality under the rule of law should be done
and refuted.

~~~
sgift
The 'pain' (as in 'felt punishment') inflicted by the fine should be equal in
all cases. If you have more money that means a higher fine is needed to
inflict equal pain.

------
RhysU
By what right should the officer be able to learn my net worth the moment he
or she thinks I made a moving violation? Do you want possibly unscrupulous
officers learning your net worth anywhere you travel?

~~~
perpetualpatzer
Moreover, do we as a society want to spend money on discovery procedures to
accurately identify speeders' net worth? What do you do if a corporate
executive tells the officer he has no assets or income? Personally, if we
think speeding is a problem worth spending on, I'd rather hire two more
traffic officers than one lawyer and one accountant to adjudicate fine
amounts.

This may be one of those good ideas that falls apart on implementation.

~~~
mrguyorama
As far as I understand, Germany implements this system, and it seems to work
pretty well

~~~
perpetualpatzer
Do you know how they validate income? I suppose you could take historical tax
filings, which it looks like is what Finland does. Even with that, though, you
create the potential to significantly over-burden people with irregular income
streams.

It looks like the UK tried day fines in the early 90s and dropped it
([http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4173913.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4173913.stm)).

------
fasteo
I generally agree with this, but then, I would also take into consideration
that driving at, say, 70MPH with a Camrys is not the same that doing it with a
BMW. All other things being equal, you are way less dangerous for others
drivers in the latter case and this should also be used to "equalize" the fine
for speeding.

Or is this too unfair for the people that cannot afford a BMW ?

------
agapon
I thought that points were designed for that. At least in NJ you can get both
fines and points depending on a type of a ticket.

------
timc3
I would love to see this happen in many places. But in the US - probably the
last place it will ever happen.

------
devnull791101
the doctrine of equality of outcomes is evil which is what article is trying
to achieve. being successful is not a crime or morally wrong as much as the
likes of sanders/corbyn like to fantasise that it is. the fact that one person
can handle a fine easier than another is no more consequential that the fact
one can run faster than another.

------
braptor
The fine should be the same. No free lunch for someone who chooses to be a
nurse instead of a portfolio manager.

~~~
Ro93
the point of a fine is to act as a deterrent... billionaire isn't going to
care about $100.

They aren't going to care about $1000 either, but at least it's doing more
social good.

~~~
commandlinefan
> care about $100

He will care if he loses his driver's license after a certain number of
tickets, though, which is the law for everybody, equally applied.

~~~
russelluresti
In reality, even that isn't equal. A poor person who has moved out of the city
because they can't afford housing inside of it losing their license would
probably mean losing their job, as public transportation options may not even
be available. A wealthy person could just hire an Uber everywhere and wouldn't
even notice the cost.

While the punishment is equal, the impact it would have on different
populations is unequal (which is the same issue with a fine of an absolute
amount).

------
volgo
Hard pass

------
anabis
Reminded me of Steve Jobs refusing to put a license plate on his car.

~~~
cowholio4
I thought that was done legally by leasing a new car every few months. And
that loophole is part of the motivation for the new temporary plates in CA.

Edit: reference [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-
clo...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-closed-
california-wants-temporary-license-plates/)

