Quote Originally Posted by kpaske
This will raise the cost of a forged card and decrease the number of cards produced.
The more important having a card is, the more people will pay for a forgery. It is an arms race between the government vs the free market. Free market always wins.

The answer to these questions is simple. You need an ID to use certain select modern conveniences, i.e. credit cards, driving a personally owned vehicle, travelling on an airplane.
That is not anything like a reason. That's simply saying, "it is that way because that's the way it is." There is nothing about any of those activities that mandates an ID, especially a centralized, digitzed one. In fact, your first example of using a credit card is completely backwards. The standard merchant agreement actually PREVENTS them from requiring the customer to show ID unless there are exceptional circumstances.

These aren't constitutionally guaranteed rights, these are conveniences. If you want to live "under the radar" you can pay for everything with cash and ride the bus or walk everywhere you go.
As a law-abiding citizen why should I even be ON the radar in the first place? As for actually traveling beyond your local town, ID is now mandatory. As I've already pointed out - you can't board a bus, train or plane without an ID. You can't drive without an ID either. The best you can do is to hire a car and driver which is prohibitively expensive. If you have to be rich to travel anonymously, then there is no fourth ammendment.

The worst part about all these requirements for ID? They don't do a damn thing to make us safer. Not one damn thing. Anyone intent on committing a serious crime is going to use false id anyway and always will no matter how much technology we wrap around id cards. All they do is put the rest of us "on the radar" so that if someone with malicious intent can abuse the system to hurt law-abiding citizens. These procedures and systems only reduce security while superficially making it seem like, "the government is doing something to protect us." The government is doing something alright - increasing its size and influence, but that does not protect anyone but the goverment itself.

This is fine if you are a recluse, but makes your life much more difficult if you're a terrorist. Nothing in the bill says you have to have an ID card.
As I said before, you can't travel without one., that means it is effectively mandatory to have an ID. Meanwhile the terrorist, or the child pronographer, or the drug-dealer, pick your evil-doer-dujour, is out a couple of hundred dollars for a fake id and, ironically, that makes him more secure than the rest of us.