Set fines by both how serious the offense is and how much the person earns
Steps to make it happen
- People notice that the same fine hurts a rich person and a poor person in very different ways.
- Courts first set how serious an offense is as a number of days.
- Officials work out how much money a person can freely spend in one day, using income and family size.
- The fine is the number of days times the amount for one day.
- People who cannot pay can choose to pay in parts or to do work that helps their community.
- No one is put in jail just because they have no money.
- The same wrong act gets a punishment of about the same weight for everyone.
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The proposal in detail
This proposal changes how fines are set for violations and minor crimes that can be settled with a fine. Instead of one flat amount, the fine is decided in two stages. In the first stage, a court or government official uses guidelines set by law to decide how serious the offense is, expressed as a number of days. This number does not depend on the person's income. It reflects only how bad the act itself was, and it is kept on record. In the second stage, the person's taxes, basic living costs and the share needed to support family members are subtracted from their income, and what is left is the amount they can freely spend in one day. To check income, officials use existing public information such as tax records, and ask the person for as few extra documents as possible. People with almost no income get a low minimum amount, and for people with a small income but large assets, part of those assets can be taken into account. Each society decides whether to put a cap on the total fine, but if it does, the cap must be set at a level that does not make the punishment too light for the small number of very high earners. Penalties on companies and other organizations are not covered. The system applies only to individuals. People who have trouble paying are allowed to pay in installments or switch to community service, and as a rule, no one is detained only because they cannot pay.
BenefitsThe same weight of punishment for everyone, and fair deterrence
The biggest advantage is that the "pain" of the punishment can be made equal no matter who the person is. The number of days showing how serious the offense is the same for everyone, so the judgment of the act does not change, and because each person then pays an amount that matches their income, it becomes less likely that only poor people suffer too much or that wealthy people feel almost nothing. Because a fine becomes a real burden for wealthy people too, the effect of discouraging violations that are easily repeated, such as speeding, reaches high earners as well. Also, by giving people who cannot pay the options of installments or community service, and by ending detention because of poverty, it becomes easier to break the vicious cycle in which a fine leads a person to lose a job or a home, fall into even deeper hardship, and be pushed into breaking the rules again. Public spending on detention is also reduced. It can also be expected to ease the distrust that comes from the feeling that anything is allowed if you have money, and to raise trust in the punishment system itself. Another advantage is that the basis for each amount is shown as a number of days and an amount for one day, so both the person and society can more easily check why the fine came out as it did.
DrawbacksA basic doubt about putting different prices on the same act
The strongest argument from those who oppose this is the view that punishment should be given for an act, not for a person's wealth or earnings. If two people drive at the same speed on the same road, and one pays a small amount while the other pays dozens of times more, critics say this goes against equality under the law and looks like punishing a person for having worked hard to earn their income. When an extremely large fine is issued, it may also be seen less as punishment than as taking away property. In practice, because income must be checked for each fine, the state would handle private information about people's finances more deeply, which raises privacy concerns. There could also be a new kind of unfairness: people who make their income look smaller or put assets in someone else's name could benefit, while only honest wage earners who report everything pay heavily. The work of calculating and checking could add to the burden on government and slow down the handling of minor violations. Finally, if fines from high earners become a major source of revenue, there is a worry that enforcement could lean toward raising money rather than being fair.
Learn the background
In many societies around the world, a fine is a fixed amount set for each type of violation. At first glance, the same amount for everyone looks fair. But a fine feels completely different to a person who struggles to cover daily living costs than to a person with plenty of assets. For wealthy people, a fine hardly discourages the violation, and it can become a kind of "price" paid for breaking the rule. For poor people, on the other hand, unpaid fines can pile up late fees and charges, and in the end they may be detained because they cannot pay, or lose a driver's license and then be unable to keep working. In this way the result is turned upside down: for the same act, poverty can make the punishment many times heavier. Does equality under the law mean asking for the same amount of money, or asking for the same weight of burden? Some countries in Europe already use fines based on income, and it is time for the world to discuss this again as a concrete way to rethink fairness in punishment.
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This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-15d) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes