So, it’s no surprise that we lack the passport distribution, of, say, the United Kingdom, where 80 percent of citizens have their passports (and it’s quite easy to get an affordable flight to a foreign country). Still, American passport applications have been rising steadily over the past 30 years. They peaked in 2007, which was a unique year: It was a year before the State Department started requiring passports for Americans heading to (and returning from) Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda, so there was a mad rush of applications. It also happened to be the year before the start of the Great Recession—the last year, in other words, that Americans were dropping cash on everything. Including expensive foreign travel.

(If you click on the chart, it’ll bring you to a larger version. The light blue denotes “passport cards,” which the State Department started issuing in 2008, for land and sea travel between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Bermuda.)

Passport applications have dropped off a bit since the 2007 peak, but remain fairly high, at nearly 14 million in 2010. But how many Americans actually posses a current and valid passport? That gets tricky. Adult passports are valid for 10 years, which means that an adult passport issued before 2001 is no longer valid. Based on the State Department numbers, about 114 million passports have been issued in the past 10 years.

That doesn’t take into account all the kids, whose passports are only good for five years. According to the Census Bureau, 21.8% of the U.S. population is under 16—so any children’s passports issued before 2006 are invalid. If you take those children’s expired passports out of the equation, there are only 105 million valid American passports. (I based my calculations upon the supposition that adults and kids receive passports at an equivalent rate, based on their respective population percentages. Adults are probably issued a higher rate of passports, but there is no better way of breaking it down. If you have better numbers, please share.)

That means that 34.4 percent of the population owns a passport—which is still higher than I thought. And higher than it was even three years ago, when only about 28 percent owned one. We’re not the U.K., but now that more than a third of Americans can travel abroad, we’re reaching a critical mass.

And, because America loves a good ole’ competition, we come to our final question: What are the best traveled states? This got a little complicated, as the State Department only broke down state numbers back to 2007. Extrapolating backward, based on the growth of passport applications in the above chart, we end up with a pretty map like this (click for a larger version):

New Jersey is the best-traveled state, with 47.4 percent owning passports. (Are that many people desperate to get out of the Jerz?) Mississippi is the least adventurous: Only 13.4 percent of state residents own a passport.

If you look at the map, a few things are clear: the coastal and border states tend to be the best traveled, especially in the Northeast. Far-flung Alaska also has a high rate of passport ownership, which makes sense, given it’s proximity to Canada. (And Russia!) Unsurprisingly, all of these well-traveled states are among the wealthiest in the country. The least worldy states, meanwhile, are in the South; they also happen to be among the poorest states. As their wealth rises, passport applications will likely rise. Until then, it’s a reminder: flying, especially to a foreign country, ain’t cheap.

“Legislating a higher energy price today that takes effect in the future, notes the Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would trigger a shift in buying and investment well before the tax kicks in. With one little gasoline tax, we can make ourselves more economically and strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts and free ourselves to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying anymore that it will harm our oil interests. Yes, it will mean higher gas prices, but prices are going up anyway, folks. Let’s capture some it for ourselves.”

Friedman has been advocating for a gas tax increase since shortly after September 11th, arguing that it’s in America’s national security interest to free ourselves from our dependence on oil from those less-than-democratic countries like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. A gas tax bump, though, has long been seen as a political non-starter—so much so that Hillary Clinton and John McCain called for a gas tax “holiday” during the 2008 campaign.

Anyway, Friedman’s column got me wondering: When I fill up my car with gas, where is my money actually going to? The oil companies? Taxes? Saudi Arabia?

I did a little research. In America, we pay an average of 41 cents in taxes per gallon of gas: 18.4 cents to the federal government and 22.44 cents to state governments. (State government taxes range from a low of 7.5 cents in Georgia to a high of 37.5 cents in Washington). The federal tax rate hasn’t been raised since 1993—until 1990, in fact, it was only 9 cents a gallon. (Interestingly, Reagan more than doubled the gas tax).

Gas prices, of course, have risen dramatically since 1993, when a gallon was only about $1 a pop. So, if our taxes have remained flat for this long, where is all the money going? The answer: The folks selling crude oil. As you can see in the above infographic, taxes, refining, and marketing/distribution have remained relatively flat over the past decade. Crude oil, meanwhile—which captured about 60 cents a gallon at the turn of the century—is now pulling in more than $2 a gallon! (Click on the image for a larger version of the chart).

Friedman, obviously, believes this is a bad thing—and I’m apt to agree with him. Wouldn’t it be better if the US and/or state governments were taking in a bigger chunk of gas prices, and spending it in and on our country, rather than letting it flow out of the country to some of our avowed enemies?

(Note: I’ve annotated some of the major world events—September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon Spill—that have impacted gas prices. For more on the demand/supply/speculation problems that drove up prices in 2008—and the subsequent 2009 crash—read here and here.)

Read more at 5280.com or view a PDF.

(Co-written with Natasha Gardner and Geoff Van Dyke).

Read more at 5280.com or download a PDF.

Read more at 5280.com or view a PDF.

Co-written with Natasha Gardner. View a PDF of the story here. (5280, April 2010)

Check out a PDF of the story here. (Mountain Sports and Living, Spring 2010)

Denver’s most powerful people, ranked. Co-written with Luc Hatlestad and Maximillian Potter. Read it at 5280.com or view a PDF here. (5280, January 2010)