Yikes. between the article and the underlying legal aid society paper: 1.7 million Ohioans have a suspension in a given year. Meanwhile the state has 8M licens

Yikes. between the article and the underlying legal aid society paper: 1.7 million Ohioans have a suspension in a given year. Meanwhile the state has 8M licensed drivers, so 20% of the people in the state are suspended at a given time? Wild. Unfortunately, the legal aid society betrays the "bullshit" angle that the Fed article obscures. On page 5 they talk about the types of "debt related suspensions" in their dataset - the biggest single category with over 50% of the "affected" drivers is "non compliance suspension" - which is drivers which fail to produce proof of insurance during a traffic stop or accident. The second biggest category is "forfeitures" which is people who were charged with a traffic violation and didn't bother to show up to court or to pay the fine. The article makes it sound like most "license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt" - and then opaquely bucket "not having insurance DURING A TRAFFIC STOP OR ACCIDENT" as "unpaid debt" rather than "bad driving." The Fed article doesn't make any reference to the insurance thing at all, but that's literally the largest bucket. It feels a bit of a stretch to me to then portray the data as discriminatory towards the urban poor - the article works very hard to make these suspensions seem punitive towards those communities where it seems that the real causality is "urban poor have a low rate of having insurance" -> "not having insurance causes a license suspension" both of which are kinda predictable and reasonable, and would make for a dull article. The 3rd largest group of "suspensions" is unpaid child support - behind "didn't show up to court for traffic violation" and "no insurance." This is indeed a "debt related" suspension but conveniently the Fed article doesn't feature the term "child support." We can still debate whether unpaid CP is grounds for license suspension, but for an article that relies to much on emotional flavor (eg describing affected communities etc) it seems remiss to ignore that the subset of those communities most impacted (besides those who fail to show up to traffic court and those who don't have insurance) are child support deadbeats. It's funny that the authors of this debt and payment related article on the Federal reserve website are called Kyle FEE and Brian MikelBANK.