Sorry, are you saying that criminal impersonation should be legal, because making it illegal excludes people and may be a net loss to the nation? If they want to be included, surely they can just be honest about who they are.
> European and developed world thing and use IDs with proper identification methods
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Perhaps "Europe" to you only refers to some rich Scandinavian countries?
In Eastern Europe ID cards are frequently issued solely on the basis of witness statements, fraud is very common.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of "fraudulently" issued European passports in circulation. If you go walk near embassies in Chisinau, you'll be approached a plenty of people offering to help you procure one.
I don't think Moldova is representative of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of illegals among a population of 400 million doesn't sound like such a huge problem.
I live in the poor Eastern Europe and its most certainly not true.
Where do you live in the east that you're so confident making this outrageous claim?
It's not an outrageous claim. The huge scale of passport fraud in Romania and Hungary is widely known, literally to the point where half the rich Russians living in central London hold fraudulently acquired Romanian passports.
Of course it's not only Eastern Europe, of course Greece and Italy have struggled with this too.
Rich Russians get their passports by investing in countries, you might dislike the way its possible to acquire passport but it's drop of the ocean. Your claim like its s massive problem on the grand scale of things in Europe is propaganda.
Strengthening identification is a non-starter until the US has something similar to the GDPR, and the surveillance industry has been massively reigned in. Right now it's a feature that the average person balks when asked for personal identifiers like social security number, otherwise things like grocery store discount cards would insist on positive identification. If we had a universal smartcard for ID, imagine having to swipe it for every single fucking transaction.
Apropos of nothing, but I really wish grocery store discount cards were illegal, even though taking a usually anti-government / authority stance I find it really hard to justify as a law. It's completely ridiculous how every major grocery chain cranks their prices up 20-30% unless you opt into their surveillance.
I totally agree on the annoyance and also where you're coming from. Although I'd probably focus more on requiring sale and other product prices to be published online in a semantic format. Ultimately this sale game is an attempt to frustrate the market and create inefficiency.
The wider surveillance issue should be addressed with a GDPR equivalent. What bona fide use do they have for knowing my identity and analyzing my individual purchases? None!
FWIW you can usually get the sale prices by asking the cashier to swipe the "store card" or periodically getting a new nym.
Maybe because you were never given an identity at birth? Or you are in the country illegally? Or you are trying to escape debt or the law or someone wanting you dead? Maybe you lost all your id documents in a fire and don't have anything left for the government to reissue you an ID. Maybe you've just forgotten who you are due to illness.
Plenty of reasons, some more legit than others, but there are a large number of people in this position.
Somehow the rest of the world can deal with these issues. You can skip any contract the society creates with the same reasons from paying taxes to getting a vaccine.
I always get a kick out of how the same people asking why the US can’t do things every other country does, like single payer healthcare or the metric system will have no end of excuses why the US can’t do that other thing ~every other country does: national ID cards that are used for, among other things, verifying one’s identity when voting.
You might want to see what people are actually saying. The problem with ID checks is that there are barriers to entry which are conspicuously not evenly distributed. If you live in a big city, sure, it's easy but there are a lot of people around the country who have real challenges getting to the closest DMV (which can be hours away after closures and poorly connected to transit), coming up with the various paperwork establishing their identity (e.g. think about a newly-widowed 80 year old whose husband's name was on the mortgage, all of the bills, etc.), and non-trivial amounts of money.
I really wish that someone would seriously propose a voting reform act which would basically be the national equivalent of “motor voter registration” except for anyone, at no cost, and either with widespread offices or free transportation (to cover the poor, old, blind, etc.). Get rid of every possible excuse for not having ID and then we can clean up so many screwy processes which rely on a patchwork of paperwork to handle different situations, no two agencies with identical requirements.
> If you live in a big city, sure, it's easy but there are a lot of people around the country who have real challenges getting to the closest DMV (which can be hours away after closures and poorly connected to transit)
That’s fairly deep in “the administration doesn’t want to.” territory. Granted, Germany isn’t as sparsely populated as the US in some regions, but for example we have pop-up admin posts. Effectively a bus that comes visit every few weeks, clerks pop up an admin office where you can do all the tasks, including getting an ID card. That’s not unfeasible, even in comparatively sparsely populated regions.
> That’s fairly deep in “the administration doesn’t want to.” territory
No, it's describing real things which have happened in the U.S. — for example, in 2015 the state of Alabama closed a number of DMV offices in predominantly black counties. They reversed that in 2017 after outcry and some investigations, but it's not like that's a one-time concern which will never go away. Here's a story from last year with similar concerns (note that this doesn't need to be intended maliciously to have an uneven impact):
That's why I'd like to avoid the issue entirely by having strong legal protections and guaranteed funding. The kind of pop-up you mentioned would be a great solution in rural cases, as would other possibilities like some kind of shared infrastructure with the post office or other government agencies where you could have a trusted third-party take an official picture and seal all of the provided material, etc. The idea would be to pair a voter ID requirement with a guarantee that ID would be free and easily available to categorically remove this class of concern.
I think you’re misreading my post. I’m not saying that this isn’t happening, often with nefarious reasons. I’m saying that this is a man made decision and it can be changed by another man made decision. It’s not a natural law, but people often treat it as auch.
A national ID could be issued not through the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) or other similar bureaucracies in whichever state you live in, but through the Post office. Every citizen has access to a nearby Post Office, and many times more frequently than a DMV.
> How is excluding tax frauds a "net loss for the nation"?
Calling this tax fraud is... I guess true, but kind of odd and silly.
Two people making $X/2 will in almost all cases pay more taxes while receiving fewer benefits than one person making $X. If you wanted to pay fewer taxes, you wouldn't use this scheme except in a few strange edge cases. I don't think the brothers are sharing a passport, a driver's license, and tax filings in order to reduce their tax bill...
(Reading between the lines, since you didn't seem to pick up on it: one of the brothers is an undocumented immigrant. The goal is not tax minimization... the two brothers are paying more taxes while receiving fewer benefits in order to avoid deportation of the undocumented brother.)
Legislation to broaden access for the unbanked and legal docs for non-citizens is the way to solve that use case, not enabling illegal credential sharing to obtain money as a use case (in my opinion)
Quite sure most people, the vast majority of people would rather this be tightened up just for the fact that they don't want to have others living under their identity.
As for brothers sharing a passport, I doubt that these laws would affect them the same way, especially if they're twins and pass for each other. But then, just because they can do so, doesn't mean that they should.
I know brothers who share a passport and driving license, and do just one lot of taxes between them.
Tightening up identify verification laws will further exclude these people, and may be a net loss for the nation.