PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

EUROPE SLAPPING THE RICH WITH BIG TRAFFIC FINES

By FRANK JORDANS

 The Associated Press
Sunday, January 10, 2010; 11:30 AM

GENEVA -- European countries are increasingly pegging speeding fines to income as a way to punish wealthy scofflaws who would otherwise ignore tickets.

Advocates say a $290,000 (euro203,180.83) speeding ticket slapped on a millionaire Ferrari driver in Switzerland was a fair and well-deserved example of the trend.

Germany, France, Austria and the Nordic countries also issue punishments based on a person's wealth. In Germany the maximum fine can be as much as $16 million compared to only $1 million in Switzerland. Only Finland regularly hands out similarly hefty fine to speeding drivers, with the current record believed to be a euro170,000 (then about $190,000) ticket in 2004

LINK TO THE WASINGTON POST:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/10/AR2010011001211.html?hpid=moreheadlines

This is a really, really bad idea, which means it won’t be too many months, or weeks, before some politician here proposes the same idea. One can only hope that politician is either laughed out of town or removed, forcibly, from office at once.

While it might make sense to fine people more because they have more money, it is, in effect, punishing them for being wealthy. We don’t do that here in the States, at least not in any open, intentional way. Further, such an idea wouldn’t pass muster under our Constitution, I would think, the whole idea of “equal protection under the law” being rather important.

Here in Maryland, the local governments are going speed camera crazy, in part because they are trying to make up the money lost by the recession. In putting speed cameras everywhere, they are hitting the poorest hardest, because they can least afford to pay the tickets. Further, studies have shown that people who are under great stress, such as caused by losing a job or getting a divorce, are the most likely to get traffic tickets and, therefore, the most likely to suffer more because of those tickets. (There might be a rare case where someone under intense life pressure decides to slow down because of a ticket, but I haven’t seen any studies on that.)

The whole trend in government is to ride harder and harder on the back of working people. This applies not just in eastern states where there are laws against just about everything. The so called “low tax states”, like Florida, find themselves imposing fees, tickets and hidden added taxes to make up for their public stance against taxes. What one hand gives, the other slips in and takes away. Florida, what’s more, like other mostly southern states, has tied the “driving privilege” into just about everything a citizen does, so that thousands of citizens are being crippled in their ability to earn a living by fines and license cancellations.

These actions are almost always aimed at the “underclass”, people who are on the edge financially to begin with. That is why many citizens don’t mind them, because they figure they, themselves, will never have to face a license revocation or an arrest because their car insurance lapsed. Those with lower incomes, scrapping along the bottom of the American economy, don’t usually have much power in these states, so there is no real recourse.

Right now, everyone is trying to balance their budgets, from governments to the largest corporations, on the back of the American middle class, many of whom have either been laid off from work or who are facing the daily worry that they will be dismissed. Parts of the government are working overtime trying to pull us out of the recession while mighty forces, in and out of that same government, are pulling us further down all the time

Doug Terry, 1.10.10

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