Diary of a Wolfeman

In my previous post, JustADog posted a comment and brought his own blog to my attention, where he has his own opinion on the RealID bill:

There are the obvious opponents, like the ACLU and Kennedy et. al. that are against a national identification standard – but I really don’t recall any dissent about passports, and that is a very federal ID – photo, magnetic strip with ID information, record of travel, etc.

The point here is that a passport is not required to travel inside the United States, and this RealID may end up that way. The Federal Gov’t already has in place all the personal identifying data it needs: I have a Social Security Number, which is tied to my birth records, and they have the IRS, which is tied to Social Security. They already know who I am, where I live, what I make and have paperwork to back that up. The Fed already recognizes my State-issued driver’s license as a means of personal identification.

Quite frankly, the machine-readable clause scares me. I am a technician and know how easy it is to fool (or forge) machine-readable code. I WANT a human to inspect my papers when travelling overseas. I’ll wait the extra few minutes.

Hopefully the next step would be to require any employer to only employ those with proper ID (in otherwords, NO MORE employment for illegal aliens!).

I have to ask, “where’s your brain”? There have been laws in existence for decades specifying this very thing! Those who employ illegals are breaking the law and can face serious fines and jail time for their actions. They choose to hire illegals, however, to cut down on their bottom line. We don’t need new laws or proceures here, we just need better enforcement for the laws we already have. The problem is that the INS and Border Patrol are underfunded.

Speaking of which, where is the money for this new form of ID supposed to come from? That part is noticably left out of the bill, which will leave it to the States to fund this on their own. In states like Oregon, where the budget is already in the shitter, this is going to be another added burden that will go straight to the taxpayer – and you can bet that the tax allotment request is going to be padded as much as possible to help make up for the general mishandling they have already done. I don’t want to be paying any new taxes until the state can fucking well figure out how to spend the ones I’m already paying.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.