For those of you keeping score at home, I’ve been on an informal quest for the last few years to figure out how many Americans have passports.
Last I blogged about it, I discovered a Slate article, which said there were 44 million passports in existence. Howver, before that, I saw in a Computerworld article from 2005 that said that there are 57 milion passports in circulation.
Today, I read in The New York Times that “The State Department estimates that 73 percent of Americans now lack passports.”
If you do the math based on the fact that according to the CIA factbook, the US has a population of 298 million (and change) — then that means that 27 percent of 298 million equals 80,460,000 Americans who have passports.
Did 20 million more Americans really get passports in the last year?
