Given the speed he was going, [Reima] Kuisla was assessed eight days. His fine was then calculated from his 2013 income, 6,559,742 euros, or more than $7 million at current exchange rates.
Someone committing a similar offense and earning about 50,000 euros a year, or $54,000, none of it capital gains, and with no young children, would get a fine of about 345 euros, or about $370. Someone earning 300,000 euros ($322,000), would have to pay about 1,480 euros ($1,590).
২৬ এপ্রিল, ২০১৫
Why a man in Finland was fined $58,000 for driving 64 mph in 50 mph zone.
Because he's a millionaire, and fines are calculated based on your wealth, so everyone is equally pained by the punishment and equally deterred.
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From each according to his ability.
To each according to his need.
Have they considered the incentives?
How much would it cost to tie this fine up in litigation for a year or two?
Once the numbers get big, the usual lackadaisical routine of traffic court no longer makes sense.
Recently I got bagged doing 62 in a 45 mph zone. Received only a warning - apparently I appeared to be poor.
Lashes punish the rich and poor alike.
I wonder how much Al Sharpton would pay.
How do you spot an extrovert Finn?
When talking to you, he stares at your feet instead of his own
The Progressive paradise.
From a pure cost-benefit analysis, I assume Finnish cops only ticket top line Porche, Mercedes, BMW and Audis.
Why not assign hours of community service: picking up litter, shelving books at the city library, painting graffiti covered public walls...
A beggar or a rich man presumably values an hour of life from their allotment about the same. That the market values a lawyer's hour more than a groundskeeper's hour says nothing about how the state or the public should value that hour.
In fairness then since incarceration leads to lost wages, the reverse should apply to jail sentences. If someone making $7 million gets one year in jail, a guy committing the same crime who makes $50 thousand needs to serve 140 years because Fairness!
I see some chauffeur jobs opening up in Finland. The pay is low, but other benefits will be offered.
Never forget that Finland was the place V.I. Lenin fled to in the early days of the Russian Revolution to feel safe.
If you're on welfare, does the state cut you a check if you're pulled over for speeding?
When it comes to Nobel Prizes of all sorts, Finland punches well below its weight--about on par with Croatia or Egypt--and far behind other Scandinavian nations.
When the Finno-Urgric tribes parted ways, it looks like all the smart ones headed south.
But of course then are not equally deterred. Truth is, he will never miss the $64k. The $370 will pinch the ordinary guy. So this may outrage the rich guy, but it will also confirm in him that it's great to be rich and that he doesn't owe shit to the rest of society.
Expect him to resurface in Monaco at some point.
Humperdink said...
Recently I got bagged doing 62 in a 45 mph zone. Received only a warning - apparently I appeared to be poor.
Are you old? And polite? That seems to work for me.
Gotta give it to the Finns: while I think 8 days of community service would be better, I do agree with the concept that if you are going to use a monetary fine as a punishment you should make it equitably painful.
While this may encourage appeal by the rich, the simple fact is that it's going to be an enormous pain or waste of money to speed in Finland - even if you are rich.
A MORE effective deterrent than the universal $180-400 fine we have here in the U.S. that are given out on quotas and somtimes targeted to the poor in the hopes of finding other things wrong during the traffic stop.
The last paragraph notes that he will only pay a fraction of this anyway. Same guy had a much larger ticket in the past which got reduced to around $5k.
He is a world class bitch and moaner, able to get himself on the front page of the Times. I guess that's something to write on your tombstone,
Finland--possibly the last place on earth they are going to film a Fast and Furious sequel.
I wonder how many of those who decry policing as revenue collection here, applaud this.
Nothing wrong with percentages.
The Scandinavian countries are very harsh on drunk driving; often the offender loses lifetime driving privileges. I'm sure this represents a serious problem in that climate and dark winters with Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Australia is harsh in much the same way. Pubs have breathalyzers at the doorway and morning TV hosts joke about leaving their car at a pub last night.
So, every traffic court has access to your tax records?
"So, every traffic court has access to your tax records?"
That's a good point.
Move
At first blush, it seems a good system, assess fines according to time rather than money, but without any kind of cap, the results get absurd. For one thing, it creates some perverse incentives, particularly the incentive to follow there rich closely to wait for them to screw up.
THis is good to know as I now know to never visit Finland.
"No problem! I'll just lay off one of my struggling employees! He and his family will pay the fine!!"
If I were Bill Gates, I wouldn't be vacationing in Finland anytime soon.
The internal revenue service, especially with encroachment of "affordable healthcare reform", probably knows more about people, their capital, and Posterity than even the intelligence services.
Prof. Althouse - Would it be constitutional in the US to impose a criminal fine based on the criminal's income/net worth? Suppose, for example, the fine for murder (in addition to a jail sentence) was set at 50% of the defendant's net worth. At the very least there's an Equal Protection issue - would this be analyzed under a rational basis standard? Differential punishment based on the financial status of the defendant seems very wrong and unjust to me but I'm having a hard time figuring out whether it would be unconstitutional. Maybe I would feel differently if we were talking about financial crimes, I don't know.
How about differential jail sentences based on the defendant's age - which you could characterize as the expected remaining lifetime of the defendant? Suppose the sentence were 20% of the actuarial expected remaining lifetime of the defendant for assault with a deadly weapon - that might be a sentence of 20%x60=12 years for a 20-year-old man, and 20%x20=4 years for a 60-year-old man (assuming each would have an actuarial expected lifetime of 80 years). Wholly aside from the technical issues (actuarial expected lifetime varies with age), it's hard to believe such a system would be upheld.
Humperdink said...
Recently I got bagged doing 62 in a 45 mph zone. Received only a warning - apparently I appeared to be poor.
David responded ....
"Are you old? And polite? That seems to work for me".
I am always polite because I am always guilty. It was a Pa state policeman - the best of the best. They are highly professional and occasionally will give you a break.
Not sure this will continue with our newly elected money grubbing, commie-pinko governor. His choice for Pa state police commander has hit a major snag.
"Gotta give it to the Finns: while I think 8 days of community service would be better, I do agree with the concept that if you are going to use a monetary fine as a punishment you should make it equitably painful.
"While this may encourage appeal by the rich, the simple fact is that it's going to be an enormous pain or waste of money to speed in Finland - even if you are rich.
"A MORE effective deterrent than the universal $180-400 fine we have here in the U.S. that are given out on quotas and somtimes targeted to the poor in the hopes of finding other things wrong during the traffic stop."
Absolutely.
Here, the poor are punished in disproportionate numbers and with disproportionately greater severity than are the rich, and most Americans call this justice; the idea of making the punishment equally painful for the rich seems to be a heresy of the greatest awfulness to these abjectly loyal servants of their masters.
>>given out on quotas
I didn't have a quota. I could write as many as I wanted. :)
This is nothing as far as fines go.
Try and refuse homos in Oregon to cater their wedding.
Sucks to be a Finlander!
Finnish women. Yeah.
A few years ago, I saw the largest traffic fine ever levied in California. Some doofus at the Shell refinery in Martinez had screwed up at the scales, and let a guy carry out a big piece of tank while 30,000 pounds overweight.
The fine for being over the weight limit is some hundreds of dollars, plus about $4/pound. The fine ended up being about $125,000. The refinery paid it, because they'd told the driver he was within weight limit.
Here, the poor are punished in disproportionate numbers and with disproportionately greater severity than are the rich, and most Americans call this justice; the idea of making the punishment equally painful for the rich seems to be a heresy of the greatest awfulness to these abjectly loyal servants of their masters.
I think that you need to keep this in mind. Our lower classes, economically, suffer a lot from this. For one thing, the state assesses child support for those on welfare. But missing even one payment can results in incarceration, which often means loss of a decent job, putting the person on a downward slide of intermittent incarceration and declining employment. We saw this recently with a Black victim of police overreaction, etc. Arguably, it is what comes of applying government policies that work with the middle class to the lower economic class. Somewhat related is the financing of cities, etc, on the basis of fines, instead of taxes, as we saw in Ferguson, MO.
I do think that it is somewhat important to make punishment hurt somewhat the same regardless of wealth. Right now, we see the opposite, with minor fines on the poor affecting them sometimes for years, and the rich being able to effectively ignore fines for much worse infractions. You end up with the strong impression of differing Justice for rich and poor, which is not good for an ordered and just society.
Not sure if I am completely happy with this, but think something should be done. One thing maybe might be to seize vehicles for driving maybe 30 mph over. So, the doctor blowing his turbos in his Porche between Las Vegas and Phoenix doesn't have a chance to do so again on the return trip (story told me by someone at the Scottsdale Porshe/Audi, which got the cost of a new small car each time to replace those turbos). We already have a two tier system where wealth insulates the rich from the consequences of their actions, and, as a result, often makes them more lawless.
Here, the poor are punished in disproportionate numbers and with disproportionately greater severity than are the rich
I agree with cook.
Absurd, yes, but note the article goes on to show that despite Mr Kuisla's protest he has been fined before for speeding! Can't say he wasn't warned.
"Mr. Kuisla’s $58,000 ticket is not even the most severe speeding ticket issued in recent years. According to another daily newspaper, Ilkka, Mr. Kuisla himself got an even bigger fine in 2013 when he was going about 76 m.p.h. in a 50 m.p.h. zone. That ticket was for 63,448 euros, about $83,769 at the time."
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