system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe fines for breaking laws (speeding tickets, etc) should be proportional to income rather than a flat rate. CMV

Two people are speeding down the road. They both get pulled over and are given a $200 speeding ticket. Person A makes $500 a week and person B makes $5000 a week. Person A has to pay 40% of his weekly salary whereas person B only has to pay 4%. Therefore, person B has much less incentive to follow the law since it affects him less when he breaks the rules. 

I believe that flat fines for crimes are a way for the wealthy to subvert the rule of law. If the law should apply equally to everyone regardless of income, shouldn't the punishment provide equal incentive for everyone to follow the law?
gpt
Traffic tickets work in an unfair way because of how the American legal system works. But changing it as you proposed (without any other changes) would actually make it worse.

Right now a wealthy person might have a personal lawyer, or a lawyer on retainer at their company. If they get a $500 ticket, they don't even think about it. They slap it on their lawyer's desk and say "take care of it".

The lawyer will go to court and cost taxpayer money to keep that court running with judge and bailiff and everything. It is in the court's best interest to maximize profit and minimize cost, so they let these people talk their tickets down to some stupid charge like 'defective machinery' and remove points or costs.

**Rich people do not pay as much for traffic tickets because they have the resources to get out of them**

If you increase the cost of tickets on the wealthy, they will have even more incentive to get out of it. People that didn't have lawyers before would be willing to go to a lawyer specializing in getting rich people out of traffic tickets. Using lawyers and wasting court time would become even more common for the more expensive tickets.

Meanwhile ticket revenue would be slashed from the poor people who are paying a fraction of what they used to.

Bracketing ticket costs in the current court system would only serve to inundate the court with useless lawyers arguing to get their clients off of speeding, at taxpayer's expense, while simultaneously dropping current ticket revenue. This system is unsustainable.