[mlfreeman]

I worry that as long as the money remains in government hands at all there would still be abuse.

I had two ideas in this regard.

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All fines (and proceeds from auctioning off seized assets) collected by all levels of government should be broken down into two categories:

- Traffic

- Criminal

If you have a drivers license and make it a whole calendar year without getting a traffic citation, you should get an equal slice of the traffic citation money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your DL.

If you have government ID and make it a whole calendar year without getting cited/arrested (let alone convicted), you should get an equal slice of the criminal seizure/fine money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your ID.

The funding for the distribution infrastructure should NOT come from the fines/citations/seizures.

In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught).

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The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government.

If somehow a government has no debt (shocked face here) it would kicked upward to pay down debt at a higher level (e.g. city has no debt, so it gets sent to the state...and if somehow the state has no debt, it goes to the US Treasury's donation office).

[nayuki]

> If you have a drivers license and make it a whole calendar year without getting a traffic citation, you should get an equal slice of the traffic citation money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your DL.

I like the idea. It sounds similar to these charge-and-refund systems:

* Canada's carbon tax. This adds a fee to fuels per ton (so the more you purchase, the more tax you pay). Every resident gets the same monetary amount of refund per year.

* Quadratic voting. You pay n^2 dollars to have n votes. All the collected money is divided equally and refunded to every citizen at the end.

[LeafItAlone]

> If you have government ID and make it a whole calendar year without getting cited/arrested (let alone convicted), you should get an equal slice of the criminal seizure/fine money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your ID.

Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction?

> In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught).

Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.

> The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government.

So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?

[mlfreeman]

> Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction?

Hmm, potentially...if they thought that would secure a much larger slice for themselves by knocking people out of the running...so maybe they'd have to be ineligible. However, in most cases that would require citing a hell of a lot of people (Jacksonville, FL has ~3000 cops for ~1.2m people, so they'd have to each cite several locals a day all 365 days of the year to make a dent in who's getting any money)

Since some criminals would be non-locals, you could also hand out the fines equally to all locals regardless of whether they got busted for anything or not.

> Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.

Yes, there is a randomness to it all (breaking the law vs breaking and getting caught) but I'm not going to try to compensate for or control it.

> So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?

Yeah, I realized this oversight 5 minutes after I clicked submit. However, perhaps it could be pooled and redistributed equally to pay down equal amounts of debt for all the governments in a region.

The point is that fines/seizures should not be a line item in a government budget EVER because then somehow the government will become dependent on criminal activity to an extent and go looking for it just for the money. It should be a completely unexpected windfall and thus either returned to the people or used to pay down debt. That's my hope, the details could probably take months to hammer out.

[LeafItAlone]

> However, in most cases that would require citing a hell of a lot of people

How about in the tiny cities discussed in the article that have the current problem?

It’s also easy to make it a year without an infraction: just don’t drive. Use Uber or get a friend/family to drive you. This gets easier in the cities. I know several people who have drivers licenses that never drive because they don’t have to. Do they deserve money at the end of the cycle?