An interesting philosophical/political assertion found its way into the op-ed pages of the New York Times last week: A billionaire and a nurse shouldn't pay the same fine for speeding, declared Brooklyn attorney Alec Schierenbeck.
The issue he tackles has demonstrable merit.
Few things in the life of someone like, say, Mark Zuckerberg bear any semblance to that of a janitor at Facebook's headquarters. But if the two both get a ticket for speeding on the way home, they both will owe the same fine.
But they will not both pay the same penalty in terms of effect.
A $125 fine to Zuckerberg is meaningless, but it could prove ruinous for a hand-to-mouth earner on the economic margins.
Indeed, the existing flat-fine system routinely not only imposes disproportionately punitive pressure on low-income citizens, but also escalates local incarceration rates when people are unable to pay.
Suppose you get a $25 ticket for not wearing your seatbelt, but it falls between the seats. When the court date comes and goes without your payment, a failure-to-appear fine is tacked on.
Suddenly you owe $450 or more. Your license also gets suspended, so if you get pulled over you could be arrested.
For a wealthy family, spending $500-plus to straighten out that mess is nothing. But for a single mom earning just above the poverty line, the fine might as well be $5,000: She can't pay it.
Counties and municipalities everywhere can attest to people getting trapped in the snowballing cycle: The inability to pay a small fine triggers larger fines, which of course can't be paid either. The root of the inequitable effect is the means to pay--it's different for different people.
Means-testing is standard procedure in government policies for determining eligibility for welfare benefits, certain bankruptcy relief, Pell grants for college and other types of federal aid. But the U.S. has rarely considered means-testing tying fines for petty offenses to income.
Civil courts routinely invoke monetary considerations for punitive damage awards, because it curbs abuses.
If the monetary cost of liability for a safety defect is less than the repair and recall cost to correct it, car manufacturers might make the wrong decision (knowingly allowing unsafe products on the road) based purely on economics. A court-ordered punitive fine alters the economic risk/benefit calculation in order to achieve the desirable societal outcome of safer cars.
The IRS also ties fines to income. A high-wage earner pays more tax, and failure-to-file penalties are calculated as a percentage of taxes owed, so wealthy offenders pay a higher IRS fine for the same violation.
Schierenbeck thinks the time has come for progressive fines across the broad spectrum of American legal penalties.
Everybody already acknowledges that the "fair share" of taxes cannot be applied evenly based only on numerical census; does it not follow that penalties proportional to income would create more "fair" fines?
Internationally, other countries use a "day fine" system based on what an individual earns per day. Typically there are minimums and maximums assigned, depending on the severity of the offense; a jaywalking fine might be a small fraction of a day, serious fraud might result in fines totaling 30 days or more.
If a single mom waitress brings home $65 a day after taxes, and a speeding ticket commands a half-day's fine, her ticket would be $32.50.
The same half-day speeding fine for a CEO earning a $350,000 salary (say $200,000 in take-home pay) would be north of $750.
Technically, that's not really a progressive fine, because both parties are paying the same rate (a half-day's wage) and not staggered, marginal rates like income taxes use.
But it's certainly more equitable in that each party is suffering the same proportional discomfort: an hour is an hour to everyone, and both have to forfeit what they earn from four hours of their work compensation.
That seems an improvement over the existing situation, where a $125 fixed-fee fine can prevent the waitress from making her car payment but might only deprive the CEO of his green fees that week.
A corollary consideration is the very purpose of fines in the first place.
To the extent they exist as a funding source capitalizing on minor vices, day fines would benefit local and state government coffers (and likely reduce the uncollectable debts on the books).
If the main purpose of a fine is to deter activity, a fixed-dollar fine is totally ineffectual above a certain income level.
A few years back, Finland, which has operated a no-maximum day-fine system since 1921, was in the news over a businessman who was cited with a $67,000 speeding ticket.
Zuckerberg and other billionaires needn't worry about seven-figure traffic citations, however. Satisfying our Eighth Amendment prohibition of excessive fines, and prudence itself, would require more common-sense boundaries here in the states.
A 16th seed just beat a No. 1 seed in March Madness, so maybe the time is right to upend conventional thinking on things like fines and fairness.
Arkansas lawmakers could do far worse than experimenting with the idea.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 03/23/2018