This is a kernel of a good idea; it can be refined further by making the fine a percentage of the combined value of all taxable property registered to that person (otherwise the fine hits middle class drivers disproportionately).
Would probably need to leverage something like the interstate drivers license compact to synchronize that data across all states, and there'd need to be solutions for edge cases e.g for people who rent cars and homes rather than own them.
You just took a simple and easily implementable idea and made it insanely difficult to realize. It seems worth trading a bit of theoretical "fairness" to have something that could actually work.
It's not "a bit" in this case. The entire point of the change is to reach those who can't be reached by it today. Middle class folk are still dissuaded by multi hundred dollar HOV fines, for instance, so what's the point of pegging a fee against their 100,000 dollar Porsche?
The goal is to tag the people for whom a few hundred dollars means nothing, and you're not going to get there with a percentage fine unless you're factoring in all their assets registered to the state and incentivizing the state to enforce tax evasion statutes. CHP, for instance, has at most two officers enforcing Montana plate dodging in SoCal.
That's the problem with "simple" statutes; they're easy to dodge and thus hurt the people who can't.
Why are you choosing to die on this hill lol, I'm trying to help your point.
How many SF, NYC, DC folk do you know pulling 150-250 a year driving cars that are 50% of their income? It's frequent; anecdata, I can think of a dozen.
That misses the forest for the trees without any of those. You still penalize low and middle income drivers and miss the people who disregard the social contract the most.
Missing the forest for the trees is foregoing a decent solution that a single city could implement in 12 hours for a solution that will literally never happen ever.
You think Montana is (or should) expose a complete picture of a citizen’s financial situation so that New York City can issue tickets a bit more fairly in the event that citizen visits NYC?
Won’t happen.
The point is not to punish every single violator exactly fairly, it’s to more effectively deter violations among everyone
Imposing the control on the people who cause the least problems relative to the problem population is worse than the baseline.
And most jurisdictions have laws promoting snitching on your neighbor for tax evasion anyway. You don't even really need the compact; just pour some of the fine revenue into enforcing property tax evasion. That simplifies it to just enforcing the fine against a percentage of registered wealth wherever you live, and the reciprocity challenge can be deferred to later. But then you're likely to score wherever the driver has their multitude of cars garaged.
Billionaires will still escape, but people definitively in the upper class will be more effectively deterred.
That is an excellent suggestion although obviously needs a minimum amount because a fair number of cars being driven around have a cash value close to zero.
