Does this not just drive people to organize their finances to have less income and more capital gains?

Sweden has a Gini coefficient of 0.867. Only Russia and The Netherlands are higher - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...

Theoretically it’s supposed to include capital gains, but according to German Wikipedia we use the net salary.

Ah so it's worse for poor people than rich people. Unintended consequences I guess.

It’s still better than flat amounts.

Were you thinking about Switzerland maybe [1] ?

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/01/record-speeding-fine-dents-swi...

>0.001% of it for running a red light.

That would be $1 on a $100k salary.

While it’s not for fees and only for court convictions, Germany has the concept of "Tagessatz" (Day-fine [0]) which means the monetary punishment is given in a number of those, one day-fine is supposed to be the money you would normally make in one day.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine