I.e. 100k embezzlement gets you 2.5 years
Edit.
I meant this to be the national average income (40k if I round up for cleaner math), not based on the individuals income, it’s a static formula.
Crime$$$/nat. Avg. Income = years in jail
100k/40k = 2.5 years
1mill /40k=25 years
My thoughts were, if they want to commit more crime but lessen the risk, they just need to increase the average national income. Hell, I’d throw them a bone adjust their sentences for income inflation.
Ie
Homie gets two years (80k/40k=2), but the next year average national income jumps to 80k (because it turns out actually properly threatening these fuckers actually works, who’d’ve figured?), that homies sentence gets cut to a year he gets out on time served. Call it an incentive.
Anyways, more than anything, I’m sorry my high in the shower thought got as much attention as it did.
Good night
Instead, punishment for ALL crime should be proportional to the perpetrator’s annual income. That’s how they do it in Finland (and it seems also some
otherScandinavian countries), for instance. They have had at least a couple of instances of over $100k speeding tickets, for example. This makes incredibly SOOOO much sense that it will never happen in most capitalist countries.Some references: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-businessman-hit-with-121000-speeding-fine
I’d like to point out that Finland is not Scandinavian, because they’d want me to
Finne, Fennoscandia then.
I believe they’d say Nordic
But it should be, since the mountain range that gives Scandinavia its name does stretch into Finland
Thank you, I knew this but forgot it when I was posting.
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They have had at least a couple of instances of over $100k speeding tickets, for example.
I’ve become rather favorable of the idea ticketing proportional to income/capital. It’s always bothered me that, in a system where everyone pays the same ticket price, essentially, a rich person can just eat a ticket as simply the cost of driving. I think that it should affect them at the same magnitude as anyone else. One thing that pops into my mind, however, is what happens if someone gets their ticket payed for by someone else? For example, what happens if a rich parent’s child gets a speeding ticket? The child, who may have a very low income, and, as a result, a very low ticket price comparatively, could have that ticket payed for by their parents, so the punishment wouldn’t affect them as much as someone else who was poorer.
Yes, it makes an incredible amount of sense to fine people proportionally to wealth/income. I don’t know what they do to prevent the scenario you’re describing, but would hope that they have addressed that possibility.
Whoever downvoted me must be a millionaire?
Make fines for companies breaking the law to make money a percentage of the profit generated from it, with a base percentage of 125%.
but that would disincentivize their activities. wow, very anti-business bro, don’t be such a pinko
exactly. not so much of a ‘free’ market when businesses cant even break the law
with a base percentage of 125%.
Given that that is greater than 100%, what would you say happens if they don’t have the resources to pay that extra 25%?
I would assume bankruptcy if you couldnt pay it off.
If someone steals a TV from Walmart they don’t get to keep the TV and pay $100 dollars in fines. It would make sense they have to pay 100% of the TV if it isn’t confiscated back, and then “damages” on top of it.
That’s the idea I got from reading what they said
Revenue, not income. Income and profits are too easy to hide.
Good point.
It should be proportional to the personal income of whoever committed the crime
Net worth, not income.
All net worth including stocks, property, etc.
Oh no. My collection or rare mighty beans.
Farmers getting a hard time on this policy
How would debt play into this? Would that be factored as a discount on the time served or increase it?
Farmers regularly drive around in multimillions worth of vehicles so they are definitely on that hook
Those sweet, sweet unrealised gains
And if a company is the perpetrator, it might just have to go out of business or be acquired by the government.
Similar to what I mentioned here, assuming that the punishment is a fine, what happens if that person simply gets their fine payed for by someone else? They could artificially lower their income, and pay their fine through a proxy.
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That’s inversely proportional
I have no idea how you managed to get that entirely backwards.
Why imprison? 100k means you work for free at chipotle until you pay it off.
Hm, garnering wages in this way (ie as if paying off a debt which matches the cost of their crime) might disproportionally affect the poor. For example, assuming no overhead, a person who makes 50k year could pay off a 100k in 2 years, whereas a person who makes 10k a year would pay it off in 10. This may actually have an effect opposite of what OP seemed to be intending — the punishment should have equal weight to everyone.
Perhaps a way to improve your idea to mitigate the mentioned issue would be to also scale the total fine to be repayed by income. Sort of like a progressive income tax.
I don’t think you read what I said: if mr white collar criminal steals $100k he works at chipotle for however long it takes to pay it off. Not at his old job. At chipotle.
If it were his old job, agreed 100
We can make this progressive by for example adjusting the employer by crime. 200k: mcd’s. 500k: Walmart. 1m+: your states dmv.
Ahh, yeah, I think I did misunderstand you — my bad! I didn’t realize that you were describing something like indentured servitude.
Only the best for Enron! I mean they only destroyed the energy economy of the west for decades and counting. Plus California already re-affirmed their support for slavery, so it’s either work as a free man at the DMV for the rest of your life or work as a prisoner printing license plates.
I think it should be all the money you made from the crime + punitive damages based on a percentage of the total amount of money you stole/defrauded.
It just needs to be completely unprofitable to break the law, in any circumstance (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a financial crime). If the fines take away less money than you make continuing to break the law, that’s just the cost of business. The punishment need to actually deter the crime by making such crimes unprofitable.
So if I have a net loss for the year, I’ll get paid to commit crimes?
I like the way you think, you would do well in the Australian property
racketmarketPerhaps there could be a mandatory minimum fine?
plus televised caning.
Trouble is that charging, let alone convicting, the establishment of financial crimes has always been all but impossible.
In the UK, Boris giving huge taxpayer’s cash to his mates for pointless never-delivered contracts. Post Office crimes against postmasters for false convictions waved away because they still control the NHS. That list is endless.
100k would probably get someone 8 months.
If they are higher up it would be like 4 months
I think they are saying time-served would be based on the value of the crime divided by the median income. In OPs example, median income is 50k.
Is the embezzler a $7.25 or otherwise minimum wage worker or a well-paid nepo baby?
He’s a tipped employee.
Punishing people harder has never in human history actually solved a problem.
Considering with many financial crimes the fine is less than the ill begotten profits, changing the fine from the current “cost of doing business” to an actual punishment is a matter of correcting a perverse incentive.
If the profits were ill-begotten then they should be paid back. Usually that’s what happens, and it’s a constructive form of justice.
But sending people to jail for years is just retribution. It’s not a deterrent. If it were, then countries that jail people a lot would have less crime, when in fact the opposite is true. If people advocating JAIL! JAIL! JAIL! were honest with themselves, they would admit that their real purpose is just to make the culprits suffer. Okay, although personally I like to think we can be better than that. In any case, it’s not gonna solve anything.
This thread is about financial fines, not jail time, but regardless, here’s the ‘The Formula’ scene from Fight Club. This is effectively how it works in the real world. The money isn’t paid back.
Imo, I don’t think that OP is necessarily advocating for a harsher punishment for anyone, but more that whatever punishment is enforced should be felt equally by everyone.
Ok, rich boi bootlicker.
Unsure if this is sarcasm or not. But in any case it’s not a counter-argument.
Beating your wife used to get you little to no punishment, and was much more commonplace.
Punishing people at all has solved many problems though. The shit they’re dealt now are discovery taxes, not punishments.
Punishing people at all has solved many problems though
Examples please.
Um… Just to be clear, you’re implying that literally all forms of punishment for any crime are unnecessary and ineffective? Because one problem that was greatly lessened by punishing perpetrators was the more transparent forms of discrimination. If you want to argue that Title VII was useless then… Uh… Good luck.
Not sure what Title VII is. I’m saying that non-restorative punishment is basically useless to everything and everyone except the party inflicting it. And it may not even be useful for them (if, for example, they were earnestly following New Testament Christian principles).
I think we would all do well to consider this fact. Punishment in the form of retribution (which is usually what people mean by punishment) is just not effective at solving problems.
Not sure what Title VII is.
Yeah fair enough. Change that to the civil rights act.
I’m saying that non-restorative punishment is basically useless to everything and everyone except the party inflicting it.
Then what’s your answer to murder? You can’t restore a human life.
Murder is not too difficult: you lock 'em up on the grounds of protecting society, since this was premeditated violence and they might do it again.
Accidental homicide is where it gets tricky. Obviously someone who runs over a child by accident is going to jail. The usual constructive justification is that this “an expression of society’s outrage”, or similar. There’s truth in that. But the real, underlying, motive is surely to inflict suffering on the perpetrator as they inflicted it on their victim - in this case, completely unintentionally. My point is that it’s not constructive, it doesn’t solve anything except add misery to misery. And it’s hypocrisy, because we all know, deep down, that retaliation is about us, not them, but we won’t admit it. I hate hypocrisy.
I once got badly injured in a road accident entirely caused by someone else’s gross negligence. There were no witnesses and they got off by brazenly lying about what happened. Did I hate them? Yeah, a bit. But then the lying was rational and I might well have done the same in their place. They wanted to escape punishment, which after all serves no purpose to anyone. Did I even want them to go to jail? Actually, no. I would have accepted a sincere apology and some symbolic act of making amends. A day of community service, perhaps. But our system is not set up like that. I think it’s a shame.
in this case planned murder is tricky. because the person they killed is directly responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths and the government was unwilling to lock them up for everyone’s safety.
I think it should be proportional to the lives affected. You embezzeled 100000 people you will spend 100000 years in jail. White collar crimes deserve harsher punishment than blue collar crimes.
To clarify, I meant national average. As in, an average American makes 40k a year, white collar crime 1 mil, get 25 years since that’s how long it would take an average American to get 1 mil.
Just seems like the poor get punished, while the rich don’t.
Well,technically you’re wrong.
Punishment is simply the flip on reward. You could say they get “negative punishment” but no one wouldn’t mistranslate that shit.
They are simply rewarded is probably better, or shall I say, more accurate…
If you want people to see this comment, I’d recommend updating your post’s body with such types of clarifying information instead of adding the information as a comment. This comment of yours was buried down towards the end of the comment section for me.
FYI, the median personal income for a person working full time, year round is just above $60,000 in the US, so 1 million dollars of crime might only deserve 16 years, 8 months.
JPMorgan Chase has paid out $30,000,000,000 in fines over the last 20 years or so. That means if you apply similar logic to companies, their executive team owes up to 500,000 years in prison collectively, which is only 3,000 years per member of the senior leadership team.
Source on median income pls?
US Census seems to put it at ~42k/year
I would swear I’ve seen an annual figure, but I’m not finding it.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm shows the weekly figure, and $1165 times 52 fits with $60k/year. Sorry I don’t have a nicer is source
I.e. 100k embezzlement gets you 2.5 years
For whom? Your post title seems to talk about having proportionate punishments:
Punishment for financial crimes should be proportionate to the average yearly income.
yet you only stated a single punishment without mention to whom it would apply, and how it would differ for someone else.
*average national (I should have said that part) yearly income. Formula below
Financial crime / avg. Nat. Income = years in jail
I. E 100k/40k=2.5 years
1mill/40k=25 years
Hopefully that clears up the math behind my dumbass high in the shower thought
Thank you for the clarification 😊.
Well clearly someone who lost their job and steals toilet paper gets life in prison, as it is $8/0. Kidding, but yeah, I guess average annual income means if you are poorer, you get punished more for stealing the same object. Not sure that’s a good idea
average annual income means if you are poorer, you get punished more for stealing the same object. Not sure that’s a good idea
I’m inclined to agree.
