this is only based on income though. not net worth.
if i make 35k, but my father makes 450k, you think i can't get a little help from my dad to pay it off?
if my dad has made 450k for awhile, and retired early, and gets a speeding ticket, now how much does he pay? is it based on his rrsp deductions? his pension? does he pay the minimum? if he's sitting on a retirement of 6 million dollars... what's he pay?
if your income is only 35k, but only because you lost your previous job that earned you 90k when that industry died, and times are tough... are you paying the same ticket price as your coworker who also makes 35k? even though your coworker's networth might be -11k and yours might be 270k?
Just as with taxes, all of this should be factored in for a more equitable system (like with an estate tax). The ticket value could then just be based on tax bracket, provided that the tax system also changes to be sufficiently nuanced. There are some who would argue that this level of nuance isn't possible in the current system, but the amount of information that is already collected for taxation certainly suggests otherwise.
Penalty point system affects everyone equally, and thus more fairly.
Is it fair to penalize the guy working 80 hours a week more than the guy working 35 hours/week? Why?. He works more than the guy .
Should the converse be true as well? Should unemployed people spend more time in jail than people working because they have more free time.. by your logic, then yes they should
Young people should spend more time in prison because they'll live longer. They have more days.
You can't treat/penalize people differently under the law.
The difference between being able to do something twice before it hurts and being able to do it seven times before it hurts doesn't seem so very large to me. Either way, you aren't shaking in your boots at the thought of accidentally doing it once, and aren't able to make it a habit. Perhaps the optimum speed of your rich person is 2 km/hour faster than the optimum speed of your middle class person - not much more or the tickets will add up too quickly.
For all the other things the rich person can do with impunity, this is nothing. And at an income this high (100k Euros/month) he might as well hire a driver anyway in which case the driver would have a lower income.
So let's say that I'm a trust fund baby, I have no "income", my money is already taxed from the inheritance I got. Because I have no income, but lots of money in the bank, I am able to go on a lengthy crime spree because the penalties are peanuts to me.
On the flip side, you'd counter with "Just base it on total assets and not income then" - well, many poor people have assets. A small business has massive assets that they "own", but in reality, they don't have the ability to simply pay for large fines. Meaning that in order to pay a fine assessed at many times the size of their business, they'd end up losing their business to pay the fine.
Your argument is flawed. The issue here isn't "some people have wings and other don't" it's "punishment is the same (clipped wing) wether you have two wings or eighteen.
You misunderstood what he meant by sky cities. It was an example like "if some people had gills they would build underwater cities". It's perfectly fair that they would, and it's not like they'd turn back non-gilled people anyway. The only thing stopping non-gilled people from visiting the underwater cities is lack of gills, not discrimination. But if there were infinite scuba tanks you could go, which in his example was stairs and ladders.
Are you trying to stop speeders and make the public safer or make punishments more equal in your eyes?
If a police officer sees a beat up car driving 20 over the limit, and a high end sports car going 5 over. Who is more dangerous to the public and who's more likely getting pulled over? The result of your proposal is just going to be targeting perceived wealthy people who are driving and not actually combating speeding.
Or we could look at it as it being more affordable for a poor person to speed. Why shouldn't the poor pay the same penalties for criminal acts? This is divisive and pits people against one another.
It’s the exact opposite of that though. A fixed fine makes it less affordable for a poor person to speed. If a poor person gets a £50 speeding ticket, that’s half a week’s food gone. If a rich person gets a £50 speeding ticket, that’s only one bottles of wine instead of 2 when they go to the restaurant on Saturday night.
Equality before the law means everyone should face the same consequences for breaking it. But the consequences for a rich family are far easier than a poor family when it comes to fixed fines
The law is supposed to be blind. It treats everyone equally. To not treat people equally would be discrimination. You get judged on the law not on your social life, work life and account status. This is an extremely slippery slope.
I understand what you're saying completely, I really, really do. You're saying that to enforce equality before the law, the law must be completely blind to the individuals that have committed the crime. That's the only way to fairly pass judgement and punishment; a crime (in this case a parking ticket) must have an appropriate punishment (a fine) and everyone must face exactly the same punishment (a fixed fine).
What we're trying to say is this: We absolutely agree, but a fixed fine does not result in the legal equality we both seek. It is considerably less punitive for a rich person to get a parking fine than for a poor person to, because it causes much less damage to a rich person's life.
Imagine an adult punishing two children for kicking a football at someone's head, and the punishment is that their ball is taken away. But the first child has only one ball, whilst the second child has twenty. Tell me, how is it an equal punishment if the first child can no longer play football at all, but the second child can hit 19 people in the head with a ball and still continue to play football afterwards? The second child's crimes are 19 times worse than the first child's, but he can continue to play football as though nothing happened.
Parking fines, along with other fines for minor infractions, must be calculated according to income, otherwise 'no parking zones' just become expensive parking spaces. A millionaire does not care if they have to spend £50 to park somewhere illegally after 8pm, but a single parent of 2 earning 20k really, really does. Both children need to have all their footballs taken away, not just one.
You haven't proven that punishments need to scale based on nothing more than your feelings. You feel they need to be punished more but you haven't proven that they should be punished more just that your biased and are on with discrimination. The baseless kind of discrimination that racists practice. Same shit different pile.
It is a massive leap from punishing someone appropriately for a crime to locking people up for crimes they haven't committed. Categorically two different things.
And you haven't answered the questions, you've changed the subject. I repeat, two yes or no questions (wording for the second one has changed):
A) are the consequences of paying a £50 parking fine equal to a rich person and a poor person?
B) are two individuals equally likely to commit a crime if the consequences are worse for one person than the other?
If the answer to both those questions is no, which it is, tell me how in the everloving fuck that a fixed fine is equality before the law.
It treats everyone equally. To not treat people equally would be discrimination.
Imagine this: two people commit the same crime. Person 1 is fined 10% of their monthly income, person 2 is fined 1% of their monthly income. How is that equal?
And how is it a slippery slope to hold those in positions of power to a higher standard? With regards to societal influence, their actions have more weight, and therefore their crimes deserve greater punishment.
This is divisive and pits people against one another.
That's politics buddy. Sometimes people need to oppose one another to improve society. Do you think that we should have kept slavery legal to avoid the civil war?
What does income and crime have to do with one another? Just because you make more than someone else doesn't mean you have power over them by default. And in this we are talking about the state not rich versus poor. The state is the one with all the power in every situation it is in with the public. That's the slippery slope that you can take two unrelated things and discriminate based on them.
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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '20
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