Former President Donald Trump was fined $5,000 by a New York judge on Friday for violating a gag order not to speak about any members of the court staff – and was warned twice about possible imprisonment.
“Donald Trump has received ample warning from this Court as to the possible repercussions of violating the gag order. He specifically acknowledged that he understood and would abide by it,” Judge Arthur Engoron said in his order Friday.
“Accordingly, issuing yet another warning is not longer appropriate; this Court is way behind the ‘warning’ stage.”
punitive fines should be a % of net worth or they are not punitive. zero deterrence
i guess were lucky they even mentioned jail time. lucky us.
The Internet loves that line but it is still wrong
If I suddenly lost 5-10% of my money? Well, I would probably have to sell my house and car and also figure out how to get money out of my 401k and IRA. So let’s focus on the actual money I have in the bank. I would basically need to cancel an upcoming trip and postpone some renovations I am planning to have done next year. Which would be annoying, but whatever.
If someone working two jobs just to make ends meet lost 5-10%? They would not be able to eat or make rent and would likely be homeless and unemployed.
And if a millionaire lost 5-10% of their money? Well, they would be pissed, but it would not impact their quality of life at all.
Monetary fines will always favor the rich.
And if we do consider a world where your fine includes stuff like equity in a house? You would see an actually successful insurrection almost overnight because that is the kind of stuff the world associates with the less fun kings of england… and almost all colonizers.
It doesn’t have to be 5-10%, it could be 0.5-1% or 0.05%-0.1%. The point is to scale with wealth.
That is even more meaningless for the rich but still can ruin the life of the poor.
As a bit of an exercise to understand why this is so meaningless to the people it is meant to actually punish:
There are
24*365.25hours in a year.1M USD / 8766 hours ~= 114 USD/hourTo burn through one million dollars, you would need to spend 114 dollars per hour for an entire year.
Even at 1%, 10k is almost nothing. It sounds good on the news and keeps people from realizing just how massively fucked the world is, but it still isn’t even the inconvenience of a medieval weregild.