Edit: should have said 'poor tax'

The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.

Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.

It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed.

Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?

Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels.

The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement.

And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.

Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general.

We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.

Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).

The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.

It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.

"Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage.

> That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).

Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year average is $340k. So now you're increasing their exposure even more -- before they get a hugely disproportionate fine if it happens to be in the one year they made $1M. Now they still get a disproportionate fine but are exposed to it for three times as long.

> The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.

Michael Dell hails a cab and then the driver gets a speeding ticket. No evidence driver had any idea of his passenger's net worth; no evidence the passenger ever requested exceeding the speed limit and couldn't see the speedometer from the back seat. Is this a billion dollar fine? Who pays it, the person who has nothing like a billion dollars or the person who did nothing wrong?

It's clearly unreasonable to impose the fine in that case, but it's also easy to use it for arbitrage if you don't.

> It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.

Maybe we should have a preference for rules that are effective rather than performative.

Not quite how he phrased it, but close. Original is here: https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/

The US was always about dreamers taking big risks for big rewards. There are a lot of things that can be fixed that don't remove that ceiling that other countries have.

The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote is from Ronald Wright. The Steinbeck quote is actually very different than the Ronald Wright quote.

The actual quote is mocking wealthy armchair leftists rather than explaining why the American working class rejected socialism:

>>Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property. ...

And the post you're responding to is making a much less extreme position, that it's hard to scale the fine properly.

For instance, someone might be significantly speeding for 10 years, and never hurting anyone or causing any harm (financial or otherwise). Should they pay nothing?

Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?

But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?

Yes, that one. Increasing everyone's risk is harm, sorry if I wasn't clear about that part.

> But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?

The line of thought here is: Does it matter? If the average speeder pays $2 of fines per $1 of harm, it's a net positive. Yes that does let rich people buy priority. But rich people can usually buy priority. At least they're not getting a helicopter involved.

Probably not, but we can look at the averages anyway.

> how much does 200 lives lost cost? is it their accumulated net worth? expected earnings through what would have been left of their careers? how about lost limbs, emotional damage etc?

200 statistical lives are worth about 2 billion dollars. That question has an easy to look up expert answer, and you don't worry about the details of each case.

> how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm

We have some useful numbers on the impact of speeding, and for something like this assume the worst plausible impact.

Edit: If there's around 1 death per hundred million vehicle miles and it's worth ten million dollars, that's ten cents of death per mile. If a quarter of deaths have speeding as a factor and we exaggerate that to 100% blame, that's 2.5 cents per mile divided by how rare speeding is. If we guess 15% of people are speeding at any moment, that's 17 cents of damage per mile. To pay double they'd need a $200 ticket every 600 miles of speeding.

You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.

So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.

I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)

Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.