Misattributed Motivation
It seems to me that legal fines, late fees, or other sorts of punitive charges paid to municipalities, states or the federal government ought to go into a rainy-day or special projects fund. This would force government to budget based on taxes and other more regular and predictable sources of revenue. This would have two obvious benefits:
- It would help the government to save for either hard times or worthy special projects that would otherwise be too costly.
- It would take away the monetary incentive behind levying fines and focus more on the appropriateness of the punishment.
That second point is the important one. If the motivation for enforcing rules is to bring in operating revenue for government and law enforcement (the seizure of drug money to fund the purchase of policing equipment, for example) rather than simple justice, the metrics for which issues to focus on become skewed.
Reversing this, without the monetary incentive the importance of the infraction itself becomes the metric for enforcement rather than the cash benefit.
That seems a much more just way to apply the law.
Comments
The biggest problem I see with your suggestion is political corruption. I imagine we'd start seeing an awful lot of bridges to nowhere if we had a large fund set aside for unspecified large public works. Then the police would still being fining citizens to fill up this fund so their political leaders would be able to reward the companies that got them elected.
One thing that needs to be done, and could be done rather simply, is to remove required ticketing numbers. I realize this is put in place to make sure police are doing their jobs, but if they don't find enough people doing something wrong, they're going to start handing out tickets and warnings to people with, for example, headlights out.
Another partial solution is to merely simplify the laws and let adults be adults without intervention of a nanny state. This one is much harder to implement, with both our "conservative" and "liberal" parties being all about intruding into the lives of average citizens.
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My main goal with the idea is to decouple those who impose the fines from those who use the funds. How government spends money is an entirely different issue, of course. But special project that come out of a dedicated fund are far less harmful to the practical operating costs of government than ones that come from the general fund or extra taxes (though you might argue that funding projects through a SPLOST tax ought to incentivize citizens to keep a better eye on how their government spends their money). There still needs to be a mechanism for prioritizing, judging and approving special projects, but that will have to wait for another blog post, by me or others.