I'm old enough to remember whe we had 5 year passports. They cost 15 dollars + 2 dollars for some other charge -- total of 17 USD. Then Reagan came along with one of his many efforts to "help" (by "help", Reagan actually always meant another four-letter word that rhymes with"duck") the middle class by extending passport validity to 10 years while raising the price to 55 dollars. The rationale at the time was that the cost/year was only going up a little, from 3 something dollars to 5.50. Now they repeatedly raised the price, eliminated endorsements, which means that any change requires a new passport at full price, introduced a charge of 83 dollars for new pages, and now they want get rid of that soon. The net result is that the average annual cost of a passport will have gone from about 3 dollars in 1980 to probably soon over 50 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, 3 1980 dollars is about 10 dollars today.