Basically extortion to continue the absurd, ineffective security theater.
Is it that uncommon to have a passport in the US? That’s basically part of the common ID paper you’d have here.
Yes. We can travel over 3000 miles and still be in the same country with about every climate. Meanwhile for a family of 4 it would cost almost $700 to get passports and involve waiting weeks. Then flying say Seattle to Paris for instance would cost about $3000 before actually doing anything there. This is in addition to the $300-$400 spent every 5-7 years on normal identity documents that you need for other purposes. This cost varies substantially state to state.
Meanwhile families here are facing drastically escalating costs especially housing and medical.
Compare that to a European who could travel 100 km on the train and be in another country.
Americans have both increased dis-incentives and less incentives to travel internationally compared to Europeans.
for a family of 4 it would cost almost $700 to get passports
You lost me there for a moment. In France, a biometric passport costs 86 € (~$100) for 18+ people, 42 € (~$49) for kids between 15-17, and 17 € (~$20) for people younger than 15. It lasts 10 years for adults, and if you renew your national ID card and passport at the same time, you only pay for one (ID card alone is 25 €, ~$29).
$700 for a family of 4 sounds insane. But if there’s no incentive, I guess I get it. I basically kept using my passport for a few decades instead of having an ID card, so it feels more natural to me.
Compare that to a European who could travel 100 km on the train and be in another country.
We don’t need a passport to go to most other European countries, fortunately.
I mean EU citizens can also travel similar distances in the schengen zone without a passport and just an ID card.
Does it cost $3000-$5000 for a family of 4 to go anywhere you would need one and require the family to shell out an extra $700 when half the population is living hand to mouth?
No a passport is about 50 Euros if you have time to wait 6 weeks for it to be made. And you need ot as soon as you leave the EU, so Africa would be one area for example, should be aroubd 800-1000 Euros.
Now I wonder, don’t you need a passport for south and central america?
Showing this was not about security at all.
It never was
One could argue surveillance and tracking is about security. They’d be wrong. But they could argue that.
That’s absolutely about security. Just not yours. There’s a lot of people whose financial security is at risk if they can’t sell that data.
Title leaves out “or passport.”
In a push to get you to think you must have a Real ID, I’ve noticed the media constantly leaves out or minimizes the fact that a passport is sufficient to get you through an airport or any other place a Real ID is required.
So no extra fee of you have a passport.
You know some dumb shit TSA is gonna not understand that part.
Okay good, I used my passport last time I had flown so I was worried I’d have to cough up an extra fee the next time.
A passport is a really good thing to have, and lasts much longer than a Real ID state license. It ends up costing like $13/yr and it opens up the whole world to you. It blows my mind that on;y 50% of US citizens ever bother getting one.
My real ID is 8 years versus my passport’s 10. And cheaper, less hassle to renew, and more convenient to carry. But I do have both.
My state also hasn’t offered non-real IDs in several years.
Well over half of us live paycheck to paycheck and traveling is exorbitantly expensive. Especially international travel.
It sucks being broke.
Ding ding ding- the commenter your replying to must not be poor to think buying something you cannot use is a good idea 😂😭
Travel can be done cheap. Don’t go to the exorbitantly expensive shitty fake ass resort where you get food poisoning.
Go be real, in the real world.
It costs 165 bucks per person or almost $700 for a family of 4. Then they need $3000-$5000 to travel round trip once to a destination in Europe.
Why is europe the only place you’re considering travel to? It’s a big world out there
I guess I figured on an English language online forum most of the folks here are US and Europe
Because it’s romantic.
As a passport holder myself, that was my plan. This article has me wondering if we’d still be charged the fee. TSA is notoriously stupidly incompetent, and I wouldn’t put it past this system to be giving kickbacks to agents.
idk, not by the letter of the law, no. But they are they are pretty awful sometimes. I personally always used my passport for all flights even before REAL ID existed, it’s just easier for them than offering a license from a rural state like I live in that they may see once or twice a day.
So is this just legal way to bribe the TSA
We still need to go through the process to make sure that we verify who you are
As long as I don’t have any weapons it shouldn’t matter.
A meme of jd vance is the most dangerous weapon of all
Oh shit I’m cooked
without a REAL ID or passport
It would only make sense if it was a one time fee, and you got your ID as a result.
We also know it’s not about security, or you couldn’t fly without one.
We know it’s a cash grab because they’re counting on a “built-in” amount of flyers who won’t have or will refuse to get ID with privacy issues. If, by some anomaly, more or all flyers acquire the ID, then we’d see maintenance fees added and the fee itself increased to maintain revenue certainty - but who are we kidding, those things will eventually happen anyways.
I was under the impression real id was required to fly. This article is the first hint I’ve seen that it’s not. I wonder if that changed recently?
Or passport. I fly fairly regularly for work and don’t have a “REAL ID” star on my license
Don’t you have to renew like once every 10 years? Real ID has been a thing for awhile, can you even renew without getting it?
I think I have three years until it expires, so at that point I’ll have to get it. Not worried about it until then
It’s still optional in some states, and it’s hard for some people to get since it requires extra residency proof and a birth certificate or naturalization papers.
My guess is the intent was always revenue…not security. Security was just the pretext for new revenue, because margins are thin and there’s a certain proportion of people who will pay to prioritize privacy.
I paid for a real id license when they were first available in my state, and I’ve paid for a renewal. I disagree with the surveillance society they enable but I’m also a realist who wants to travel conveniently.
But I’ve still never gotten one. When it comes down to it, actually getting a real id license requires taking a day off work and waiting in line at the Registry …… whereas I can renew a standard license online and have a few years left on my passport
One of the many ways RealID has been a fiasco is RMV/DMV’s not staffing up to support it
I’m in a backass hillbilly state but I just made an appointment at the DMV and then had to wait all of 5 minutes when I got there. But, then they tried to argue every single piece of paper I brought which involved calls to supervisors so it wound up being a 40 minute ordeal. I swear they don’t want you to actually get it.
when I was like “hey can I do my REAL ID real quick now too?” to the DMV agent I was renewing my registration with, he literally laughed at me 🤣. It’s like 90% the effort of getting a full-blown passport, at least with the documentation they make you give in my state…
I never got one because my license expired during covid and i didn’t have a recent bill/bank statement (and I had no intention of walking into a DMV at that time) fortunately i do have a passport that i plan to renew as soon as it expires, but my passport is supposed to be for international travel, not domestic.
it wasn’t that long ago that you only needed a birth certificate to travel to the caribbean or a border country. this is getting out of hand.
I use my passport for domestic travel almost always. I come from a small state so it’s just easier than showing the TSA agent a type of license they see maybe a couple of a day and don’t know how to read. Never had an issue.
Same, I’ve been renewing online for the past 12 years. This year I had to go in and they gave me a hard time over my points. Apparently you can’t have more than one letter from the same government agency. I had 2 from the DMV and was like, “This is literally you guys! Two separate forms. Two separate dates! You don’t trust yourselves enough to get it right more than once!? Like, trust me dude, nobody’s going to the DMV pretending to be me. No sane person would put themselves through that torture just to steal my identity… Nobody wants to be me, it doesn’t come with a whole lot of perks.”
Thankfully, I just had my passport renewed, so I said screw it and got my regular one.
Do you have a recent W2 or tax return with your current address on it? That + valid passport is good in my state.
oh so it was never about security.
The agency warns that even then, there is no guarantee that individuals will be cleared to cross through the security checkpoint.
Bummer, that’s another $45 to re-check until they get it right. I’m guessing this will happen a lot.
I mean that’s obvious. Otherwise you’re just paying $45 to ignore the security checkpoint if you’re guaranteed to get through with payment.
It’s far from obvious these days that the US wouldn’t apply a mandatory straight-up bribe to its government services. It’d just be a smaller-scale version of Trump’s “gold card” visa.
Fucking ABC and their autoplay of videos
There’s really something wrong with people if they think the government can’t track you down with all the paper trail that comes with being a contributing member of society. People that want to live in a bubble thinking they are anonymous are delusional. Full stop, if you own property, you are no longer an anonymous citizen. The only way to be even close to anonymous in this world we live in today is to have a burner prepaid cellphone with zero online services logged in, be homeless (or live with family), have zero credit, no car, no credit cards, no bank account, and be jobless.
If you’re reading this and think that you’d be happy with that lifestyle, you need help.
