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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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?

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