Wrap your mind around this. You get caught doing 64 m.p.h. in a 50 m.p.h. zone. Your fine? $58,000. Outlandish? Yes, but not as absurd as it looks at first glance.
Fifty-eight grand, or more, is a possible fine in Finland for someone going 14 m.p.h. over the speed limit. Not driving drunk, not speeding through a school zone, not causing an accident, just speeding. The only factor making the fine that steep is the driver’s income. In this case, the driver made $7 million a year. In the good ol’ U.S. of A., that doesn’t matter. Here, a fine for speeding is supposed to be a fine for speeding, no matter who you are. But in Finland, and in some other Scandinavian countries, they see things differently. They believe in progressive taxation far more than we do—if you make lots of money, you can afford to pay a significantly higher percentage of your income in taxes than someone who makes less money, they believe—and they also believe in the idea of progressive punishment.
Let’s logic this out. If two people are sentenced to six months in prison for a similar offense, they’re getting equal punishment — 182 days taken away from their lives in the outside world. If another two people are made to do 200 hours of community service, again, they’re being forced to give up the same amount of their time as punishment for their crime. But if two people are fined $300 for speeding, their economic circumstances can make that fine as different as night and day. Someone earning a minimum wage has to work almost a full week to pay the fine. For someone who earns a million dollars, it’s about half an hour’s pay, and for the Finnish speeder in question, it’s closer to 5 minutes. There’s no way you can say those people have been punished equally for their offense.
Here’s the rationale behind that $58,000 fine. The judge decided the offense deserved a punishment of eight days earnings — actually, half of eight days earnings, the way they calculate it. So you take a $7 million annual earnings, divide it by about 250 working days a year, then cut that in half, and you come up with $58,000. If someone else made $30,000 a year, that person would be fined about $240.
It’s a logical system, far more logical than ours. If the punishment is supposed to fit the crime, then it should put as close to the same hurt on everyone as possible. If it’s supposed to act as an equal deterrent—”I better not do that again!”—the punishment should matter equally to rich and poor alike. The Finns’ way of calculating speeding tickets comes far closer to that ideal than our system where everyone is supposed to pay the same fine for the same offense.
Obviously, we’re never going to give fifty thousand dollar fines for going 14 miles over the speed limit here, nor do I think we should. In fact, that’s not the way things work out in Finland either. The $58,000 ticket was appealed, and the guy ended up paying $5,700. But if you’re thinking about fairness, we should be taking the ability to pay more into consideration than we do.
And if we go from progressive punishment back to progressive taxation, the implementation changes but the concept is the same. Those who have more can afford to pay a larger portion of their income to maintain the government and the services it provides. In Finland, top earners pay more than 50 percent. Here, the rich get richer at the same time they fight tooth and claw to lower the amount they pay.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2015.
Nothing more than confiscatory policy. Steal from the rich , because “they must have stolen it from somebody else.”
When you fully understand progressivism you will hate it.
Not quite David W.
Its not stealing, its meting out a punishment that will have the same impact on them that it would on anyone else for the same offense.
And its not because they must have stolen it, its because they won’t care if a financial punishment has a minimal impact on their life.
If I’m a millionaire getting fined a few hundred bucks for speeding I’ll speed all fucking day long and pay the tickets and not care. How is that justice for the person who speeds once and is paying off minimum payments on a credit card for 2 years to get back on top from it?
They did the same crime, yet the punishment doesn’t effect them equally. I don’t understand how you could have read the article and not understand that.
Umm. A person who works for McDonald’s and a doctor put in prison for the same amount of time, or given the same amount community service are not receiving the same punishment. The person working for McDonald’s time is of less value. The doctor’s punishment is greater monetarily. It actually supports your contention that rich people should be punished more.
What is missing in the analysis of this policy is how it impacts peoples behavior. What if you knew if you got an A that you would have to do triple the homework of other students? I think that would discourage success.
Ohhh my, the rich are so evil…and we’re so fucking jealous.
Actually tctw, the person who has less resources would absolutely be paying more when he or she goes to prison. If he has a family, they will not have enough to live on and would have a difficult time starting again when he comes out. THe rich will.
When the rich person is in prison , the family will be fine then and when they come out.
And whoever made the argument that taxing the rich more or a higher percentage is wrong… You do know that we tax the poor people a higher interest rate in Arizona than than the rich for some taxes? Also sales taxes hurt the poor more than the rich.
The rich can afford to pay more for traffic violations by far because it affects him less. THey also can afford to pay more than they are on income taxes for the same reason and we would be out of debt very quickly.
The arguments that it is not fair that the rich pay more for fines or taxes just has no good reasonable foundation. Pretty soon it may be the rich are the only ones that go to school or if we somehow hang on the our k-12 education, then they would be the only ones to go to college. So much for playing a level playing field. Isn’t this suppose to be the land of opportunity? Aren’t we actually sabotaging opportunity for the poor or poorer?
If anyone’s taken a drive down the Loop 101 through Scottsdale and seen the spoiled brats in their high end autos zip past you without a care in the world, you can understand where the Fins are coming from. A large dent in their pocketbook will make them think twice about driving like a jackass.
I argued this a few times in court, refusing to pay the unjust/unequal fines and going to jail instead. Judges here (or at least in Texas) won’t buy that argument because they are not working for minimum wage. They are working for the wealthy. specially the elected, rather than appointed, ones.
I don’t understand how this relates to taxes. Are both a form of punishment?
I think another difference is that no matter how you slice & dice it, the rich will only be paying for speeding and less likely to have additional fines or jail time for: no insurance, no current registration or no valid driver’s license.