There is a reasonable argument that such fees should go to the general fund for the locality, not to some specific department like law enforcement (because of incentives).
But I do not think there is a reasonable argument that the money should "go back to us, directly" rather than going to the local government. I mean, if you REALLY wanted your tax bill to come with two extra lines on it:
> Refund due to collections from legal enforcement: $ -54.36
> Additional charges for operating costs: $ 54.36
...but I HOPE you are bright enough to realize that the net difference between showing these lines on the tax bill and not showing them is meaningless and that there is little benefit to bothering to list it that way.
Actually, due to transparency, I would want the ability to drill that deep into the financials of the county, state, and country I live in. Even if it is a net positive offset by an exact equal negative.
The problem is when government is opaque, we get things like "Govt services are horrible, blablabla". Whereas if funding wasn't in omnibus bills and covered up, we could see "Yes, their performance is low cause they are understaffed and working on a shoestring budget. They couldn't even afford office supplies."
I mean seriously, we value provenance in software with tools like Git. Why not Government and expenditure calculations? I certainly see a value there, regardless the party.
Writing laws such that fines are distributed back to the population uniformly would make the impact easier to understand.
Pooling all revenue, from both taxes and fines, would make budgeting more complex as the tax rate would need to fluctuate with the expectation of fines, including the ones from new legislation. Any new fine legislation would thus be a tax bill by side-effect.
It does.
There is a reasonable argument that such fees should go to the general fund for the locality, not to some specific department like law enforcement (because of incentives).
But I do not think there is a reasonable argument that the money should "go back to us, directly" rather than going to the local government. I mean, if you REALLY wanted your tax bill to come with two extra lines on it:
> Refund due to collections from legal enforcement: $ -54.36
> Additional charges for operating costs: $ 54.36
...but I HOPE you are bright enough to realize that the net difference between showing these lines on the tax bill and not showing them is meaningless and that there is little benefit to bothering to list it that way.