We should do this on everything. Income scale on the price of milk, gas, electricity, toll roads and parking meters. $3.00 for a gallon of milk is a lot for someone making minimum wage, but it is less than chump change for a rich guy. We should add on an additional tax so they don't take it for granted. The top 1% should pay $30 for a gallon of milk! We should make them put stars on their chests so we know who they are and what income bracket they fall into. Or better yet, lets put a microchip in everybody and have the IRS keep the database so it automatically updates income! Reduce consumption and waste and bring those rich bastards down to everyone else’s level! Only as long as it won't affect me, though.

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EMPIRE
Urban Regeneration Program
"Promoting new communities and creating jobs"
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Do you really believe this congress will agree to raise taxes on ONLY 2% of income earners? Do you believe as President, Obama would veto any bill that raises more?


Correlation is not causation.

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There are only two things wrong with this great nation of ours, democrats and republicans!

Not necessarily in that order.

1) You're ignoring the slippery slope argument that points at how democracy can "punish" the wealthy more and more for sillier and sillier "crime", and how the wealthy will leave the country in order to avoid such prosecution.

2) Can you prove to me that progressive fines have an impact on crime rates? Crime is performed by the desperate, and the wealthy don't exactly qualify as such.

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Be curious, not judgmental. - Walt Whitman
Nothing happens unless first we dream. - Carl Sandburg

Reason-->Justice, Power-->Utility. Don't mix up the two no matter how closely they're interrelated.

Someone once said that 23% believe they are in the upper class and another 27% foolishly believe they will be one day!

Quote:

1) You're ignoring the slippery slope argument that points at how democracy can "punish" the wealthy more and more for sillier and sillier "crime", and how the wealthy will leave the country in order to avoid such prosecution.

HUH? What silly crimes are the rich being charged with that the poor are not being held accountable for?

Quote:

Crime is performed by the desperate, and the wealthy don't exactly qualify as such.

Are you saying rich people don’t commit crimes, so they have to make up one’s for them? You do realize that shoplifters/petty thieves do more time for stealing less than $20 items, than white collar criminals do for stealing millions by slight of hand pencil whipped paper work, and the largest majority of them see no jail time or have the worry of being indicted?

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/weekly_article/prosecute_white_collar_crime.html

Quote:

Let's start with the numbers. Wall Street, after all, is about numbers, about playing the percentages. And that may be the very heart of the problem. Though securities officials like to brag about their enforcement records, few in America's top-floor suites and corporate boardrooms fear the local sheriff. They know the odds of getting caught. The U.S. Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report is the official reckoning of the Department of Justice. For the year 2000, the most recent statistics available, federal prosecutors say they charged 8,766 defendants with what they term white-collar crimes, convicting 6,876, or an impressive 78% of the cases brought. Not bad. Of that number, about 4,000 were sentenced to prison--nearly all of them for less than three years. (The average time served, experts say, is closer to 16 months.) But that 4,000 number isn't what you probably think it is. The Justice Department uses the white-collar appellation for virtually every kind of fraud, says Henry Pontell, a leading criminologist at the University of California at Irvine, and co-author of Big-Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis. "I've seen welfare frauds labeled as white-collar crimes," he says. Digging deeper into the Justice Department's 2000 statistics, we find that only 226 of the cases involved securities or commodities fraud

Quote:

Can you prove to me that progressive fines have an impact on crime rates?

You do realize this is about finable offences, right? What statistics would you like to see that we both know do not exist?

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There are only two things wrong with this great nation of ours, democrats and republicans!

Not necessarily in that order.

Only if the rich get flogged more than the poor. Because healthcare is easier to obtain and they have better vacation spots to recover. They have better clothes too, so we should force them to wash them with wood-chippers.

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Do you really believe this congress will agree to raise taxes on ONLY 2% of income earners? Do you believe as President, Obama would veto any bill that raises more?


Correlation is not causation.

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There are only two things wrong with this great nation of ours, democrats and republicans!

Not necessarily in that order.

White-collar crime is not inherently associated with the poor, but the argument isn't restricted to fineable offenses or even crime in general. For example, populist movements in Latin America, Central Europe, and Southeast Asia result from corrupt politicians scorning private success by setting enterprises up for disaster. When the enterprises fail, the people lose faith in free markets and entrepreneurial innovation, and they switch their support towards governmental security. By allowing democracy to establish dominant political economic management, the law can be skewed such that privately affluent lifestyles are not allowed to prosper unless they cater to governmental authority.

Neither your argument or citation make sense. Regardless of how we're talking about fineable rather than imprisoning offenses (and how we're considering crimes, not torts which require private lawsuits), desperation is inversely related to affluence (which is common sense):

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new study provides some of the best evidence to date that low wages and unemployment make less-educated men more likely to turn to crime...
...Weinberg said the strongest finding in this new study is a link between falling wages and property crimes such as burglary. However, the study also found a link between wages and some violent crimes - such as assault and robbery - in which money is often a motive...
...The theory behind why crime increases in the wake of falling wages is simple, he said. "A decline in wages increases the relative payoff of criminal activity. It seems obvious that economic conditions should have an impact on crime, but few studies have systematically studied the issue..."
...As expected, economic conditions had no effect on the criminal activity for the more highly educated workers in the sample.

However, among less educated men, lower wages and higher unemployment rates in the states where they lived made it more likely that they had participated in crimes. This was true even after the researchers took into account factors such as cognitive ability and family background.

"Low-skilled workers are clearly the most affected by the changes in labor opportunities, and these results remain after controlling for a wealth of personal and family characteristics," he said.

The reason higher-end shoplifting receives harsher penalties is because of the value of the stolen merchandise, not because of the affluence of the shoplifter:

Shoplifting and the law

Under most state shoplifting laws, a business owner or employee has the legal right to detain a suspect if they have probable cause . Probable cause is defined under shoplifting laws as: having direct knowledge of an offender''s approach, selection, concealment, movement, and/or modification of an item, and his/her failure to pay before attempting to exit the store. When a person is caught shoplifting, they will be required to return the items, will be prohibited from returning to the store for a period of time, and may be prosecuted through shoplifting laws.

Shoplifting is considered a misdemeanor petty theft if the value of the stolen goods totals less than $300 to $500. In some cases, first time offenders may be charged with a less serious crime such as disorderly conduct so as not to face the consequences imposed by shoplifting laws.

If an offender has a history of shoplifting or the value of the stolen goods exceeds $500, shoplifting laws often yield harsher penalties. An offender can be charged with grand theft or larceny , both of which are felony crimes. Under shoplifting laws, a person who is convicted of this crime may receive a sentence that includes jail or prison time, punitive fines, community service, and/or other penalties.

As far as white-collar creative accounting's concerned, prosecution is against the violation of legitimate practice codes, not the intensity of the crime. Again, this is the difference between a tort and a crime. In order for executives to be punished more harshly, they would have to be summoned by a private party rather than prosecuted by an Attorney General, District Attorney, or Justice Department. The problem is that the major civil violation is the exploitation of publicly ACCESSIBLE rather than CONTROLLED services (besides the filing of publicly demanded financial statements and prospectuses which are private burdens anyway), and it wouldn't be right for the law to assume representation on behalf of plaintiffs (which is why we see PRIVATELY enacted class action lawsuits).

On top of this, your source refers to the rates at which white-collar crimes are prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced, not the proportion of its activity which is white-collar related instead of non-white-collar related; and your article ADMITS that some white-collar classified cases are welfare fraud (in an attempt to prove that the Justice Department is inflating its white-collar prosecution rates).

I want to see that progressive fines outperform flat fines in deterring crime (or some comparable example). The commonsensical approach would be to say that higher fines reduce opportunity costs, but the sheer waste of time from the hassle of being prosecuted significantly reduces opportunity costs in itself for more affluent citizens who's time is priced more highly; and crime rates are INVERSELY related to wealth meaning that REGRESSIVE fines would have stronger impacts on deterring crime rates than anything else since the less affluent would have to pay an even greater opportunity cost for committing crimes.

__________________
Be curious, not judgmental. - Walt Whitman
Nothing happens unless first we dream. - Carl Sandburg

Reason-->Justice, Power-->Utility. Don't mix up the two no matter how closely they're interrelated.

It seems there's a disconnect here on a very basic level. So to clarify, do you believe the point of fines is punishment? Why or why not? If you do believe fines are for punishment, then you really should see how the price of milk isn't a comparable concept. We don't charge people for milk to punish them. We charge them for milk because milk doesn't just magically appear - people have to work to produce, package, and transport milk, and those people must get paid.

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-Wikipedia

"I’m not your buddy, friend.
He’s not your friend, guy.
I’m not your guy, buddy.
He’s not your buddy, friend.
I’m not your friend, guy."
–South Park, Canada on Strike

The price of milk will remain constant, it is the tax that will be adjusted. It is only fair for life to be just as painful for all.

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Avatar reads:

EMPIRE
Urban Regeneration Program
"Promoting new communities and creating jobs"
Democrat stimulus package.

Do you really believe this congress will agree to raise taxes on ONLY 2% of income earners? Do you believe as President, Obama would veto any bill that raises more?


Correlation is not causation.

Do we adjust the strength of the punisher for size of the punished? What about those that have dulled senses? How do you determine one's pain threshold? How do you determine if the punished has suffered enough? Those that derive pleasure from the pain?

What if you’re unemployed? No punishment?

__________________
Avatar reads:

EMPIRE
Urban Regeneration Program
"Promoting new communities and creating jobs"
Democrat stimulus package.

Do you really believe this congress will agree to raise taxes on ONLY 2% of income earners? Do you believe as President, Obama would veto any bill that raises more?


Correlation is not causation.