I mean, sure, but one is also your drivers license and costs $5/yr more than a standard license or ID.
That’s really the price we should be comparing, because realistically people will have a drivers license or state ID that they would have had to renew. That’s also true for passports, but far more people have and use drivers licenses day to day.
I would guess that a physical ID makes the states and the economy a lot of money. It cost almost $40 to renew a license here in Alabama and it can be done in less than 15 minutes. It is a token that allows third parties to verify the ID of someone with pretty good accuracy.
The cost of the id itself is only part of the real cost. There's transportation expenses, taking time off work to go, in some cases it is expensive to get the documents necessary to even get an ID like a birth certificate
Not only can you tie all of your speech to a government-issued ID, you can do it for the low price of $160 and a piece of ID that forty-percent of Americans will have no other use for!
Many Americans have difficulty obtaining ID, because they cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining government-issued photo ID card.
Underlying documents required to obtain ID cost money, a significant expense for lower-income Americans. The combined cost of document fees, travel expenses and waiting time are estimated to range from $75 to $175.
The travel required is often a major burden on people with disabilities, the elderly, or those in rural areas without access to a car or public transportation. In Texas, some people in rural areas must travel approximately 170 miles to reach the nearest ID office.
Step 2, you can self certify up to 10 hours how much time you've spent on prevention or dealing with ID theft. That's $250. And if you can prove it with documentation, an additional 10 hours, for a total of $500.
Here in Washington State, it's $4/year more for a Real ID driver's license than for a non-Real ID license, and licenses are good for 6 years.
A passport card is $30 and is good for 10 years, so effectively $3/year.
Passport card vs Real ID license cost is interesting. Going for the passport card is more expensive for the first 6 years, but then for years 7-10 the passport card wins. For years 11 and 12 the Real ID license again wins. And then for years 13 onward the passport card wins.
However, the assumes you already have a valid passport or passport card. If you do not, so this will be a new one rather than a renewal, there is an additional $35 fee.
If you don't actually need a passport or passport card other than to use as a substitute for a Real ID license, that extra one time $35 fee makes quite a difference.
It makes the Real ID license come out ahead for years 1-18, then the passport card wins years 19 and 20, then it is back to the Real ID card being cheaper for years 21-36, then the Real ID license for years 41 and 42, and then finally the passport card from years 43 onward.
So, for Washington State residents, in summary:
• If you already have a passport, but don't want to use it for domestic travel or other things that a Real ID license can do that a regular license cannot, getting a passport card is a good deal.
• If you don't already have a passport, and so have to pay the extra first time $35 fee to get a passport card, then it is probably not worth it unless you actually need a passport for purposes other than being a Real ID substitute.
I can't find any site that lists the Real ID extra fees, if any, for driver's licenses in other states. Checking a couple of individual states it seems we are getting a bad deal here in Washington. It appears that there is no extra fee in California, New York, and Illinois, for example.
There’s no excuse to ask for an ID scan to “verify identity” when you can buy a really really good quality automatically generated fake id scan for $5.
Would maybe be defensible if they asked for actually verifiable information, like a dump of the cryptographically signed contents of your chipped passport (haha).
How long after phones replace credit cards will they replace driver's licenses?
As both manufacturing and network costs fall, it's conceivable that anyone without an identity-document-compliant cellphone would be issued one, for free or no cost, by the same government entities that issue driver's licenses or other official IDs.
$130 dollars for federally-issued identification that is valid for 10 years is not expensive.
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