Making it directly free doesn't solve all the issues.
8 years ago I was in a state I grew up in, but wasn't born in. Real ID was started, and I needed to renew my license.
Even though I have had a license for 25 years in this state, they required me to verify by identity again to meet the Real ID requirements. This required a birth certificate.
The state I was born in, at the time, didn't allow mailing of birth certificates. For $12, I could pick one up locally. The two states were 1700 miles apart. My only option, other than a road trip or flight, was LexisNexis. The cheapest option, at the time, was $75.
I did what I had to do to comply, other folks may have had a harder time or been entirely unable to solve that problem quickly, or at all. A corporate tax on peoples identity is only one of the possible hurdles in obtaining a "free" ID.
Nobody is saying it would be easy, or that there wouldn't be edge cases where people would get screwed. I argue that the current situation where it's an edge case to find people who aren't screwed is worse.
I further argue that your whole issue, and many like it, are caused because you didn't have a national ID, granted at birth or naturalization, which all State ID programs are required to recognize.
I actually think that we need a constitutional amendment for a national ID system. Add lots of "the government shall not" language to it for CR/CL, and require States to recognize it as a source of truth by itself that you are you.
Real ID is the current form of national ID. Some states fought it, and still haven't implemented it. The current state I'm in will be going live with Real ID in the next two years.
I took a friends kid to the DMV to get them their first license here about 6 months ago. My out of state license expires in a few months from now. I asked, since I have a current Real ID, how I should go about renewing my license. I was told that I would need to get a state license, without Real ID, until their system was upgraded to support it. Then return to get a new license with Real ID, and that would require the Real ID verification again. Even though I already have a Real ID. That's $35 per license.
I agree there should be a completely free national ID program, but the list of "shoulds" is infinite, and not worth much. No cap, like I said I agree, it's just damn near impossible to change this kind of structure from our level.
Never said that they would be. I'm arguing that we shouldn't poison the well with unfounded complaints about how a system which doesn't exist might or might not work.
That example is also apples and oranges. Given that a passport is much more expensive to make, has a ton of infrastructure mandated by international agreements, treaties, and standards, and is decidedly optional for the majority of people and it makes total sense to me that it would not be free. None of that is true about SSNs, and none of it would necessarily need to be true about a national ID.
SSNs are apples to oranges as well. I can't see a national ID not being a photo ID, so it'd be more akin to a driver's license--and those do cost money. And the cost will almost surely be higher than randomly generating a number.
The name for this logical fallacy is "strawman". We have an existing nationally issued identification card which is free and doesn't have a photo. That's an excellent reason to believe we could make a better one and have it be free as well.
I get free photo IDs all the time when I visit cloud data centers and they print me off a photo+QR code badge for the time I'm there. Drivers licenses are expensive because they are made to be extremely durable. They're made that way because they are constantly needed, not because of the photo printed on them. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever why a national ID card would have to be like a drivers license and not like a social security card. In fact, if they were legally required to be free they would very likely be just a name and a QR code. Leave all the photos to the back end, it's 2020.
