Driver program is state version of payday loan

Re: Aug. 22 article, “State fees create relentless cycle of poverty, legal case says.”

Being relatively new to Austin and Texas, I had never heard of the state’s Driver Responsibility Program, and after reading about it, I am wondering who the idiots were who thought it up.

Certainly a person who violates the law should be fined or punished in some way — but the way that this law has been set up keeps poor people in constant poverty, depriving them of their driver’s licenses and, in many cases, their living.

The law is a government version of the payday loan, an endless circle with no exit. Worst of all, the law deprives those caught in that circle of hope. Societies without hope result in civil unrest. Remember the French and Russian revolutions? MICHAEL B. DRUXMAN, AUSTIN