When I blogged about this last summer, the figure, according to Computerworld, was this:
About 8 million passports are renewed annually out of some 57 million passports in circulation.
Now I read in Slate, from 2001:
The United States issues three types of passports. There are currently about 44 million holders of the familiar, blue tourist passport (a few thousand people have green passports issued during the bicentennial of the U.S. Consular Service). About 400,000 have a maroon-covered “official” passport. These are issued to people not in the diplomatic corps who are going abroad in the service of the U.S. government–a large percentage of holders of official passports are active-duty military and their families. About 80,000 Americans have diplomatic passports.
Either 13 million more Americans got passports in the last five years, or something is terribly wrong with these figures.
