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Notes -
To steelman, there's genuine problems with paperwork and compliance overhead, especially in more marginal cases. The United States doesn't really keep centralized databases for a surprising amount of important details. If you need a replacement birth certificate, for example, at best you have to dial into your birth state (and more often birth county's) offices. In rare cases, they just don't have it; either it wasn't filed correctly, or was filed and lost. It's usually not absolutely insurmountable - though it might escalate to a point where you have to get an administrative or court finding that you were born - but it can range from obnoxious to expensive. That's doubly true for people already on the margins: if you're couch-surfing it's a lot easier to lose an envelope of vital records, and a lot harder to give a mailing address for a certified form that can take a month to get there.
Ostensibly, you need these records to do a lot of other stuff: most employers have to get a photo ID and social security card, which generally rounds to the same set of problems. If you're outside of the normal business world, though, there's a lot of people that don't.
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