Originally Posted by
Hawaiian717
I'd guess that they're not even in the minority. If we take the couple year old figure that roughly one third of Americans have passports, then it's probably safe to say that a good majority of those remaining two thirds would have no reason to care whether or not their credit cards have an FTF.
Originally Posted by
tmiw
1/3 seems kinda low in a post-WHTI world.
According to US Census clock, the US population right now is approx 318 million. The census clock includes all residents (US citizens, legal permanent residents, and illegal immigrants) so we need to subtract the number of non-US citizens from this to get as close as possible to the number of "Americans" living in the US ("Americans" defined as US citizens who are eligible to have an US passport). Depending on various sources on the internet, the estimated number of non-US citizens living in the US at any given time is around 30-40 million.
Taking the highest estimate, 318 million people in the US - 40 million non-US citizens in the US = approx 278 million "Americans"
According to the US State Dept, in 2013 there are approx 117,443,735 valid US passports in circulation.
http://travel.state.gov/content/pass...tatistics.html
117.5/278 = approx 42% of "Americans" have US passports
Far different from the accepted notion that "only 1/3 of Americans" have US passports. In fact, if you look at just the number of valid US passports in circulation right now of 117.5 million, that's about the same as the entire population of Mexico (119 million)!
Of course, we can always get picky by saying whether we should include the population of American Samoa as Americans (they are American nationals but not US citizens) or try to figure out number of dual/multi citizens, but that's going too far.
Another way to look at it is that there are also approx 30-40 million foreign residents in the US (legal residents or illegal immigrants). For example, my mom has a green card and has a Japanese passport, she lives in the US, has a bank and credit card from an US financial institution and she goes back to Japan often. She fits the bill of the group of "legal permanent residents living in the US who has a foreign passport and travels abroad often." She's part of the 40 million.
Considering that then it's a high end of 40 million foreign residents in the US + 117.5 million US citizens with US passports.
Add 40 + 117.5 = 157.5 million people in the US that are likely to travel outside the US
157.5/318 = 49.5% of the total US population that has a potential to travel outside the US. That is encroaching upon a majority of the US population. When analyzed this way, it's far different view than the normally stated "only 1/3 have US passports."