How about some mandatory community service or jail time?
Picking up trash on the streets has to be able to deter some offenses.

It makes alittle bit of sense in theory. I know many people who don't care about fines at all and put their cars everywhere. Because the amount they have to pay is way to small to affect them negativly. There is however the point system which takes away your license and people do fear that so its infact questionable if higher fines for rich people makes sense. I agree its not effective. It is more of a cosmetic effect.

@Max if you have depts or responsibilities they won't treat you like a rich person all dues are accounted for and influence the fine.

LOL!!!! Youre joking right? The reason I got married was because my wifes dad makes 130k a year (before taxes) with 6 dependants and Fafsa said her EFC was 30k a year. LOL!!!! and who would determine the fine? THE COURTS! They wont take everything into consideration. They wont nearly have the man hours to sort through that crap. Look at the fucking social services. LOL LOL LOL!

Any fine should be based on income. It's what makes sense.

Yup, definitely for repeat offenders. And also raise the fine on repeat offenses.
3rd strike, a fine high enough to cover for what it costs to put you through the community service system.

It depends of course if you actually want to change peoples behaviour or make some money. I believe the Netherlands leans more to the latter with a fully automated system from speed camera to a bill send to your home address. Based on some formula for every km/u measured over 3 km/u over the speed limit, ranging from 23 euros to 300 euros.
Ofcourse technology isn't perfect, for example a tractor got a fine for doing 144 km/u on the highway.

Here they impose your car if you're caught racing. But I guess a million dollar fine works too:
http://www.worldcarfans.com/110081327904/1-million-speeding-fine-in-switzerland-for-swedish-sls

Anyway a simple 100 dollar fine is not going to change anyones behaviour.
Losing your car, license or your time for repeat offenses or excessive offenses works much better.

Dude calm down, I was refering to how its handled in Germany where appearently the documentary referenced in the OP took place.

  If you get 200k a year but have 3 kids and insane dues than you won't be fined as someone who gets the same without any responsibilities. You can earn 200k in Germany and still be judged as a poor person. They factor in everything since the fines are measured on how much money actually arrives in your hands after everything else was subtracted. And how it gets done. Well we have one of the most complicated tax systems worldwide and judges know instantly how much money you actually really have. They don't even need to do much it gets done automatically.

Also if you think they calculated something wrong you can appeal and they will check your case. But that doesn't happen often if you have dues the state doesn't know about they will tax you more.  But the fine can get lower if you have a case. Like you lose a Million are suddenly poor and get fined based on last years data.

If its not feasable in the USA then ofcourse it makes no sense to do it there.

Edit: I just looked up the philosophy behind the fines. They ask for money not to stop you from doing it, thats what points are for but the money fine is supposed to punish people immediatly points are to abstract for that. So it does make sense to ask more of someone with more money or else the punishment wouldn't be the same since 100 bucks are subjectivly speaking not the same for a Millionaire as 100 bucks for a poor person.

I'd like to know what fine is 100 dollars. My last fine was 450 dollars for speeding 60 in a 45. On top of that me and my wife make under 18k a year and are both fulltime students and we cant even get on food stamps. If you think the courts will take something into consideration more leniently than social services you are dead fucking wrong. You can appeal to social services too but good luck. They never take you seriously.

Also there is no reason for the courts to have your IRS information. That is beyond invasive.

I had to pay a $100 fine for stopping in a no stop zone (school bus zone) on Texas Tech campus.

This is way too simplistic a solution, which is not to say that traffic fines in themselves aren't excessively simplistic.

That said, making fines fractions of a person's income does make sense relative to the way law operates normally. I mean, when you give someone, say, 10 years of jail time, you're indirectly giving rich people a much harsher monetary fine because these years are much more valuable for them in terms of the money they'll make than for poor people.

Putting this in entirely monetary terms, someone making $1m a year is in a deficit of $10m thanks to a 10-year sentence. A person making $100k a year is in a deficit of $1m thanks to the same sentence. Therefore, in monetary terms, the law already operates by being harsher to rich people in other crimes. I don't see why someone would bring up "equality before the law" to argue against this change.

YES. It's total bullcrap for a poor person like me to get a 200 dollar ticket for like not allowing a pedestrian cross the street. That's a lot of cash for me, while for richer people it doesn't matter; it truly is unfair.