Fair, but you can go thousands of miles east, west, and a fair few south and experience a lot of things without a passport. Most people in the USA don’t have a passport not because they are too lazy to get one to go somewhere interesting, but because there are so many interesting places to go without one that the extra bother seems like a great hurdle.
(I didn’t get a passport until I happened to need one for business travel, then again when I was a kid apparently you didn’t need a passport to travel to Canada because my family took summer vacations up there & I didn’t have a passport)
The actual cost is pretty low, I paid $35 for a passport card (which is only good for a few places, travel to Canada being one of them - but it is valid government issued photo ID, handy if you don’t want to show a driver’s license, or you don’t have one, or you need two forms of ID for some reason), and a lot less then an airplane ticket for a passport book. All the time to get the right pictures, fill out the right forms, after finding the right forms, that was a real bother. I won’t have messed with it for a vacation.
