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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

That is by choice, and if someone doesn't want to obtain a passport then that's their problem. The opportunity is there, should they wish to pursue it.

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Passports aren't free.

So? Passports aren't expensive either.

EDIT: I looked up the fees, it is $130 USD for a passport book, both for first-time issuance (plus separate fee of $35) and renewals. Most passports are valid for 10 years. That is not expensive, and practically free.

Source: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/passports/forms-fees/Pa...

That's expensive to most regular people.

Most people buy thousand dollar smartphones, among other luxuries.

$130 dollars for federally-issued identification that is valid for 10 years is not expensive.

Is $130 plus whatever a state ID costs a reasonable fee to pay (to the government) to access Facebook?

That's prohibitively expensive for an ID, even for most Americans. Any required government IDs should be nearly if not completely subsidized.

Requiring IDs in the USA has historically been used as a form of voter suppression. Texas is one of the worst states WRT voter suppression [1]; anecdotally in the 2020 election (during COVID) Houston, TX (3rd largest city in America) had exactly 1 ballot dropbox [2].

1. https://www.aclutx.org/en/news/5-ways-texas-suppresses-vote-...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/13/trump-j...

$130 probably isn't much to the majority of people on this forum, but $130 can buy multiple weeks of groceries for 2 people at low cost retailers. That is absolutely a lot of money to the significant percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.

Even if you're not living paycheck to paycheck, $130 could be a decent chunk of what you're able to save annually. When money and expenses aren't consistent, it's be tough to prioritize a passport with no intention of traveling internationally.

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