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The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#61

Post by throwanem »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
throwanem wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That explains why Americans give up time, money, effort, and care, to help other Americans back up out of the hole our government does not give a damn if it puts them in.

Which is really nice, but not very effective and besides should not be necessary in the first place. Systemic failure and bureaucracy can't be effectively countered by relying on volunteers. In fact, the article is a good illustration of how ineffective this is.

Oh, I agree. I suspect we might differ on the question of whether the best answer to bad government is more government, though. Wouldn't it be a remarkable thing if, for example, it were possible to exist without any number of pieces of paper and corresponding database records to prove that you do? I think it would be a remarkable thing. But I've often been called a dreamer.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#62

Post by osdiab »

jubabuba wrote: post #32
thro808 wrote: post #26

Let's see how racist voter id laws really are: https://youtu.be/llDM-44Zb8w

This is really eye opening

There are papers that demonstrate the discriminatory effects of voter ID laws on minority turnout [1], and these sorts of interview videos are easy to produce in a way that selectively validates the statement you want to convey. I don't know the data on a regional basis, but it could be the case that residents of places like New York City are better informed than those in other regions of the country.

[1] http://pages.ucsd.edu/~zhajnal/page5/documents/voterIDhajnal...

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#63

Post by throwanem »

jacquesm wrote: post #53
throwanem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is why you find people of Christian faith volunteering to...you know what, never mind. I wish I lived in a world as simple as the one you seem to.

Volunteering is not limited to people of Christian faith.

The article describes a Christian ministry.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#64

Post by throwanem »

rayiner wrote: post #57
throwanem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is why you find people of Christian faith volunteering to...you know what, never mind. I wish I lived in a world as simple as the one you seem to.

I mean, religion isn't a homogeneous thing. There are folks like the ones in the article, for sure, but there are also ones who buy into the whole gospel of prosperity thing.

Tell that to your grandparent commenter.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#65

Post by justin66 »

koolba wrote: post #13
maxerickson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her Social Security card and birth certificate were among the things lost that day. What reasons are there for the system to be structured such that obtaining an ID is difficult?

Probably to avoid identity theft.

Identity theft as we know it is a relatively new crime, but these broken ID systems have existed rather longer.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#66

Post by throwanem »

Avshalom wrote: post #60
throwanem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is why you find people of Christian faith volunteering to...you know what, never mind. I wish I lived in a world as simple as the one you seem to.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/03/roger-marshall-kansas-ob... >“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.” >Pressed on that point, Marshall shrugged. No seriously, some people have a really fucked up reading of "the poor will always be with us" and some of those people are actually in c…

I'm not sure why it makes sense to dismiss the entire faith on the basis of some sinners who twist Christ's words against Christ's example. I hope for the sake of his soul that he doesn't realize what he's doing.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#67

Post by Avshalom »

throwanem wrote: post #66
Avshalom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/03/roger-marshall-kansas-ob... >“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.” >Pressed on that point, Marshall shrugged. No seriously, some people have a really fucked up reading of "the poor will always be with us" and some of those people are actually in c…

I'm not sure why it makes sense to dismiss the entire faith on the basis of some sinners who twist Christ's words against Christ's example. I hope for the sake of his soul that he doesn't realize what he's doing.

I... didn't?

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#68

Post by jandrewrogers »

kevindong wrote: post #23

I always wondered how people get IDs if: 1) they never got one while under an age when someone else could vouch for them, and 2) they didn't have any of the documents needed to an ID because to get those documents, you need an ID.

There is a surprising number of Americans in this situation, though less than their used to be, partly by virtue of the fact that having an ID is not required and unnecessary as a practical matter for much of the 20th century. You'd have Americans with no birth records (used to be pretty common) who grew up overseas when a passport was not required, such that they didn't even have incidental records of their existence. It also used to be somewhat common in very rural areas. Consequently, there used to be a significant number of Americans who basically have no discernible record of existence prior to their teenage or early adult years. My mother is an example in fact.

It used to be, as of a few decades ago at least, that you were whoever you said you were and the ID offices would happily accept informal artifacts (like family Bibles) as corroborating evidence, particularly in regions where record-less Americans were endemic. Once you got your first ID, you could chain off of that. These days I think it would be viewed with much more suspicion if a person was record-less.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#69

Post by throwanem »

SwellJoe wrote: post #30

I've volunteered on homelessness issues over the past few years, and many of my friends are homeless or have been homeless in recent memory. This is one of the most frustrating and pointlessly cruel aspects of the society we've built (among many frustrating and pointlessly cruel aspects). I can sum up just how evil it is with one anecdote: One night a few years ago, I got a frantic message from a friend on facebook,…

> it'd be very easy to convince me that our system is built to intentionally destroy the lives of a few at the bottom

The machine in which we live does not hate. The machine in which we live does not care.

Re: The cruel Catch-22 of being poor with no ID

#70

Post by techsupporter »

rayiner wrote: post #50

I lost my wallet last year and simultaneously needed to get a passport on short notice for a business trip. I borrowed $200 bucks from my dad to pay the expedited passport fee, bought an Amtrak ticket with saved CC information to get to the same-day passport office in Philadelphia, and proved my identity to the passport office with copies of government employee ID cards and my law licenses. Even then I dealt with adm…

> There is nobody in government who is actually out there thinking of whether there is a path through this system for the most vulnerable people; the people who have lost everything. They don't care.

I vehemently disagree with the stance that "they don't care."

I've been on the other side of the partition before. Do people come to their government needing help with having fallen through the cracks? Absolutely, quite often. On the other hand, do scammers do the same thing? Yep, even more often. There are a myriad of reasons to be cautious with identity paperwork, especially in our "digital but not really because a lot of stuff is still shuffled around in paper form" era of underfunded, understaffed, overworked, and occasionally disinterested civil service.

"But, have a fucking heart and do what's right!" Damn straight, and every day I tried my best to do that. But here's the thing: in my position, in a county office that was a "jack of all trades" that handled many things from marriage licenses to vehicle registration to property records, we lived in perpetual fear of the local TV stations coming in to do some "sting" on how incompetent we all were. In the two years I worked there, three out of the four TV news departments sent "informants" in to try to catch us in some trap where we weren't following the laws and rules To The Exact Letter. (It didn't help that this was a relatively wealthy county sitting right next to one of the poorest, and minority-population-level, in the entire state.)

If you drew the unlucky straw and unwittingly wound up with one of these ringers and you didn't do everything exactly By The Book, usually because you tried to help by being maybe a little lenient on the exact list of documents needed to get a certified copy of some record, you could count on having your face-with-blurred-out-eyes plastered all over ad spots for the next week. "Is the [county] County Clerk office putting YOUR CHILDREN at risk for IDENTITY THEFT?! Are the government employees at the downtown office UNTRAINED or MALICIOUS? Find out, when KZZZ NEWS AT TEN goes UNDERCOVER to expose WASTE AND FRAUD in our county government. EXCLUSIVELY, TONIGHT."

So, yeah, I see the rock and the hard place that people of all stripes are in.

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