Speeding tickets are meant to financially penalize the offender. So, as the Associated Press reports, some European countries are raising ticket fines in proportion to the incomes of their wealthiest speeders. After all, a mere $100 fine is hardly worth slowing down for. A Swiss court recently fined a well known multimillionaire “traffic thug” $290,000 for speeding. [%comments]
A Speeding Ticket to Avoid
TAGS: incentives
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@Paul Dz: Do you think prison terms violate the equal protection clause? Most of us see nothing wrong with expressing penalties in terms of days of life lost. It makes a lot of sense to extend this to finanical penalties–make a traffic ticket cost 1/1000 of your annual income or such. Still completely equal treatment, and makes them much more effective.
Is there a precedent on the equal protection clause being applied to income?
Is this new? I seem to recall some ‘Strange but True’ stories like this back in the 90′s.
@#4 – I don’t think the Equal Protection Clause would be hard to get around. Write a statute that fines at a fixed percentage of income (a tenth of one percent? I dunno, someone would have to do math).
I wouldn’t like it much, but it seems like it’d be constitutional.
FYI the ticket was to a repeat offender in a Ferrari who tried to bluff the police officer into thinking he was a diplomat. So I think he deserved more significant punishment. And the previous story was I think a $260k to a Finnish multi-millionaire in a half million dollar supercar. As far as I’m concerned if you get pulled over for driving a car that should be on a track like it was on a track you should be fined accordingly, I’m just not quite sure how you would properly define that.
Finland has been doing this for years. They base the fine on your hourly wage which is in turn based on your reported earnings. So (in theory) each person is evenly punished in terms of how much work they have to do to pay off the fine. The CEO of Nokia famously got a ticket in 2002 for over $100,000.
@Paul It can be argued that this would *establish* equality where previously there was none. A fixed fine has completely unequal consequences depend on your income.
Great idea – we should do this for everything (food, clothing, housing, cars, etc)! That way it’ll be “fair” to everyone!
P.S. So can the poor speed with impunity?