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.”
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.