Let’s say you have a family of four and plan to travel to another country in a couple of years. Before you check into the cost of transportation, lodging, meals and entertainment, there’s something you should know. The baseline cost for this trip, no matter how near or far, will be about $400.

That’s $97 for the two adult passports, $82 for the children’s passports and whatever charges are incurred in acquiring passport photos and certified copies of birth certificates. Renewals are $67.

Those costs will be a deal-breaker for some Americans who just want to pop across the border by car, plane or boat, without having to wait six weeks for a passport. And when the cost of a trip to, say, Nelson or Vancouver, B.C., starts at about $400, it’s easy to see why families in Spokane will change their destinations.

Starting Jan. 8, those traveling by plane will have to have a passport. On Jan. 8, 2008, car travelers will have to have one, too. About one in four Americans has a passport.

The new guidelines spring from Homeland Security laws that were adopted by Congress in 2004. The idea was that the United States needed to get better control of its borders. That makes sense, but the requirement that children – even babies – traveling with parents have passports is absurd.

Under what scenario would a child traveling with passport-carrying parents be a threat to national security?

Currently, parents have to produce certified copies of their children’s birth certificates before they can cross borders. That’s already a burden for many parents who must request those certificates from other states.

Under the new law, both parents will have to apply for a child’s passport. This is to ensure that one parent is not taking the child away from the other. Single parents have an even bigger hurdle, because they have to get the imprimatur of the other parent. That, of course, can be messy.

The effect of the new passport laws could be a dramatic decline in travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, where passports previously were not needed.

There was a time when traveling to foreign countries was reserved for the upper classes. These new guidelines could signal a return to those days. That would be a blow to tourism in the United States and neighboring countries.

Congress is considering pushing back the implementation date for land crossings to the summer of 2009. It should.

Then it should devise passport requirements that make sense for national security without crippling travel-related businesses and the ability to travel.