Anyone know anything about this Disney bill? Kerry is a co-sponsor.

[beachmom]

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-s1661/text

I don't have time to read it, but the reviews are not good.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/19/132923/717/572/538456

There is some STUPID legislation around, but this Disney tax is particularly idiotic.

The is supposed to create a $200 million fund to promote tourism, by levying a charge on visitors to the US. The charge is non-trivial – the estimates I heard suggested that in order to raise $10 a head to give to the travel industry’s promotional fund, the government will likely have to impose a total fee of $25 to cover administrative overheads.

You make it more expensive to travel to the US, less people will come. But Disney, which apparently is suddenly poor, needs money to promote its theme parks!

This is one of those instances where public choice theory works – a number of big players in the tourist industry (whom, one suspects, will reap the lion’s share of the benefits) are trying to impose costs that will very plausibly hurt travel to the US as a whole, even as it directs more of the tourists who do come in their direction.

See, that's where money in politics is a problem, when Disney Corp. can buy off senators like John Kerry Dick Durbin, and Frank Lautenberg with idiotic legislation that harms the nation as a whole, all to benefit the biggest corporations. This is corporate welfare, paid for by the poor saps who still want to visit the U.S. despite all the shit this country has thrown at the world the last eight years.

Which brings me to one last point -- travel to the U.S. might be increased if this country wasn't acting paranoid, belligerent, and pretending to be under siege. The customs process for tourists is decidedly unpleasant, and no amount of Disney marketing will cover up that stink.

More here:

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/24/annals-of-stupid-lawmaking/

"The Mickey Tax"

[wisteria]

1. IMO, this bill is a positive bill designed to promote tourism and help all agencies and businesses

involved in the tourism industry, By charging tourists a nominal fee of between $10-$25.00 which goes into the promotional fund,it helps pay for this promotion and other operating expenses. I find it hard to believe that some people are complaining about such a small amount of money. Any vacationer will tell you vacationing is expensive and this charge is no more than giving up a couple of drinks. I personally think it is a good idea and will offer many benefits to those traveling and those providing various travel, accommodation, and educational services.

[beachmom]

3. I disagree. It was written by lobbyists. It's stupid. It's pork. Read the WP

article I posted below.

[ProSense]

7. Why would Kerry put his name on a bill written by lobbyists, which he's adamantly against?

As for WaPo, it's not the first time they or the media tried to spin Democrats ties to lobbyists when there were non.

Here is a release about the bill.

This needs more research, and Kos' claim on the front page is irresponsible.

[wisteria]

9. I read the bill and based my judgment on that. The WP isn't alway correct

or without a motive. I stand by my interpretation. I see benefit in the bill not just for Disney.

[beachmom]

2. And a WP article on it some time ago about lobbyists, Disney and this bill

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302837_pf.html

It is widely accepted at Disney -- if not empirically proved -- that one of every 15 visitors to the United States ends up at a Disney park. Leveraging the power of the federal government to bring more tourists from overseas, therefore, would wind up filling the pockets of the Mouse.

After gaining a consensus among his colleagues at Disney, and talking to people at the Travel Industry Association and the Roundtable, Gluck drafted his boss's "Apollo speech." It was meant to be Rasulo's call to arms. A big lobbying push was needed for a big Ask -- the term lobbyists use to describe what they are pleading for from Congress. Rasulo would not say so publicly, but he told colleagues privately that his Ask would be for at least $200 million a year in advertising funds -- four times what the Commerce Department had previously been directed to spend.

BUT RASULO, GLUCK AND THE OTHERS HAD A BIG PROBLEM. What they wanted, while good for Disney and the rest of the travel industry, contradicted a central tenet of federal policy. While they hungered to have more people visit the United States, the government wanted the opposite -- to keep people out, so terrorists and illegal immigrants couldn't sneak into the country. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, foreigners had to have personal interviews before getting visas to enter the United States, making travel more difficult. Partly as a result of the new visa requirements, the number of inbound visitors fell by 7 percent in 2002 and by 5 percent in 2003, causing thousands of layoffs at airlines and hotels. But most Americans didn't care that much. Hotels and restaurants were still making money. The public was far more worried about keeping undesirables out than making the United States a welcoming destination for foreign tourists. The industry had a second problem, as well. Visits to the United States were beginning to climb again -- on their own, without federal assistance. According to the Commerce Department, the number of international visitors increased 12 percent in 2004. It increased again in 2005, by 7 percent.

The travel industry preferred to emphasize a different, narrower set of statistics. It liked to focus on visitors from overseas rather than all inbound visitors. The reason? Overseas tourists from Europe and Asia, unlike those from Canada and Mexico, tended to stay longer and spend more, two attributes hotels and restaurants coveted. But, unfortunately for travel industry advocates, even the number of visitors from overseas rose 7 percent from 2004 to 2005. Faced with such facts, other executives might have shied away from rushing to the government for help. But not Rasulo. Marketing is marketing, after all. All it takes is finding the right argument and delivering it well. That was especially true in Washington, where incredible victories happened all the time despite the facts -- witness the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.

...

In August 2006, Freeman went public with his intentions -- sans the Ask -- in a classic one-pager, the basic mode of communication of Washington lobbyists. Unless it can be written on a single, typewritten page, lobbyists say, the message is too complicated to get far in Congress.

Freeman wrote that the partnership would "run an intensive, political-style campaign" that:

"Educates policymakers and opinion leaders on the power of travel and the American people."

"Highlights the unnecessary obstacles to welcoming more international visitors to the U.S."

"Determines how we can better compete for international visitors."

...

The Iraq war had seriously damaged America's image abroad, particularly in Europe. Getting more people to come here from overseas and see how nice Americans are in person would reverse those ill feelings, the partnership contended. The partnership even adopted a term for this jujitsu -- public diplomacy.

Okay, I am going out on a limb. Senator Kerry -- you have been HAD on this one. If the United States Congress has any interest in improving America's image to foreign tourists they will put all of their passport control and custom agents through a manners course. If foreigners were treated with even a slight amount of respect, then more tourists would come here. I met a couple from New Zealand in Rome, and they purposely flew in a way where they did not have to change planes in the U.S. Why? Because of the condescending, rude, and nasty treatment they had received in the past. My relatives who came here from overseas are oftentimes upset when they arrive because of how they were treated.

And I have personally seen how these officials treat foreigners. It would BLOW YOUR MIND. I saw a U.S. immigration official yell at a business man who was looking through his brief case for documentation, "YOU LOOK AT ME WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU". I was shocked, AND this was PRIOR to 9/11 back in '99.

But directing people to Disney? Forget it. This bill is the definition of pork.

[wisteria]

6. I agree on the rudeness, but maybe this bill will help pay for some training in the area of

customer service and proper treatment of guests visiting this country. I can't imagine Senator Kerry being fooled into supporting this bill.

[Mass]

4. Dorgan is the sponsor of this legislation and hardly a corporate welfare supporter.

Kennedy too.

Not sure what this bill is about, but a lot of good people in here, so, I would prefer to read something from sources I know are solid. Not to say that I think that the bill is good or not. Simply, I wonder why the protest came so late?

Could it be that, as senators from states with a lot of tourism, they are trying to do their job for their state's industry (as most of their co-sponsors?).

[beachmom]

5. Because someone found it apparently. Some blogger dude.

The WP article was written in Feb. '08. Look, to be clear Kerry is one of 44 co-sponsors, so obviously, this is not particularly an albatross around his neck. But I think it's stupid. Sure, the dollar amount is chump change, but let's ask two questions:

1. Is it necessary?
2. Would it really help our economy overall?

Answer to both is no.

[Mass]

8. I would have to study the question more in detail to decide. There is nothing surprising

with governments helping tourism in their country, far from it. So, what needs to be seen is to what point this is outrageous or not. And I do not feel comfortable making a judgement because a blogger and a reporter from the WaPo with whom I tend to disagree a lot more than I agree say so.

So, may be I will agree, may be not. I will tell you that after I research this.

[beachmom]

11. Thanks. And, of course, I may be wrong ....

I'm not a professional pundit, so will admit it if my knee jerk reaction is off the mark. It's $200 million, and in federal dollar relativity, I think I may have reached my limit in studying it. But please do check it out, and see if I am way off.

[karynnj]

14. I agree that it needs more research, but here's my take on it.

The idea of having a fund to promote tourism in the US overseas surprises me because I would have thought it already exists. I know that the various states have tourism advertising - as I have seen NJ's (NJ and you, perfect together), VT's and MA's. I have also seen ads enticing people to consider visiting foreign countries. It would need a source of funding and, given the state of the budget, can't come straight out of the budget.
'
It would make sense to specifically tax the industries that benefit the most to create this fund. There are so many areas of the economy that benefit from tourists that it would be hard to identify all of them. The two most definable would be airlines, hotels/resorts and tourist attractions. But, adding the tax on hotels or attractions would lead to them having two rates - one for Americans and a higher one for foreigners. (I have seen that in Sri Lanka and Eqypt) Unlike for Sri Lankans or Eqyptians, this dual price structure would go over poorly in the US. The easiest place to recover that money would be placing a fee on the foreign visitor's airline ticket, where it could be embedded, thus not seen by visitor's or added as a fee at the end. I've seen fees included in airline prices to other countries and never questioned them. They are there and if I want a ticket they are part of the price. If that cost creates a lower demand for tickets, the opposite of what the fund is created to to, the industry would push for its removal or would eat part of the cost by creating coupons for foreigners at their resorts that essentially return it.

I would look into what the airlines and key resorts think of this bill, as they are stakeholders. (As to the idea that foreigners would essentially be paying a share of the cost used to advertise to get them here - this is not that unusual - the cost of toothpaste includes the cost to advertise it. (So, saying that some visitors need no advertisement, would be like me saying it is unfair that I pay towards advertising Crest which I have bought since 1972.)

[karynnj]

15. I re-wrote this in a Dkos response

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2008/6/19/132923/717/188#c188

[ProSense]

17. A report from last November on the

decline in tourism

[wisteria]

10. I don't want to start an argument here, but how would you know it will not benefit our economy ?

I envision just the opposite. You present the US in a positive way and more people want to come and see what all the excitement is about. JMO.

[beachmom]

12. No, good question. Honestly, the country gets a better image, I think,

organically. Meaning, a tourist comes here, has an enjoyable time, goes home, and tells his friends. An official federal tourism promotion agency strikes me as barely going around the edges. I am telling you, all I hear from tourists travelling to the U.S. is how they are treated going through immigration. I think you can do homeland security and treat people with respect at the same time. I think simply with a change in leadership at DHS, and specifically passport control/immigration at the airport, tourism to the U.S. would increase. Even if someone's visa is not right and they need to go on the next plane, they could be told in a polite business-like manner, instead of being treated like a common criminal. I saw a British man whose visa wasn't right (hey, it happens), so he needed to go on the next plane back home. The way they treated him was unnecessary. He looked perplexed but certainly no air rage.

Here's the funny part, Wisteria. According to the WP report, foreign tourism HAS gone up, so really there is no problem really. AND the dollar is weak, so a lot of Europeans want to come here to buy many products like clothes cheap. Other than that, if we fix how airport security is performed, it will boom, even if our OWN economy is not doing that great. No agency needed, no $200 million needed. JMO, and of course, I could be wrong.

[wisteria]

13. No doubt the weak dollar is bringing people here. Then they shouldn't mind giving up a small amount

to come. This bill may work or it may not, but I don't see the harm in it really. It may even help implement some of the things you discuss above.

[karynnj]

18. I have seen ads encouraging visits to Britain, Italy, Spain and India

and I don't watch that much TV - and even then CSPAN is my favorite channel. Does that advertising work? Measuring advertising effectiveness is always difficult because it is hard to control the impact of other exogenous variables, but there seem to be many countries who have accepted it does - because they do advertise.

This is independent of fixing the problems with immigration. That needs to be done and it is a disgrace, but is not a uniquely American problem.

[TayTay]

16. How was this being paid for before?

Under a paygo system, things have to be funded. If there is a promotional tourist fund, then it is logical that tourists pay for it in one way or another. This is self-funded and not taking money away from vital programs.

I don't completely buy the libertarian line that only a set number of things can be done by the federal government. That line of logic leads eventually to denial of health care and social security benefits to people because libertarian logic says it should not be a function of government to actually take care of people. So, I am wary of this.

[beachmom]

21. It was killed by Gingrich during the '90s. The "funding mechanism"

was not sustainable and easy to kill.

Currently, from what I gather, we do not have federally funded advertising for tourism. We do have states doing it, local municipalities doing it, and of course, private corporations doing it.

When it comes to corporate welfare, I am a Libertarian. Now you can argue that this will benefit the country with new tourism dollars (although, the fee which will be obvious is going to piss some tourists off). But you can't deny that this will benefit private corporations like Disney. If it was just general advertising that showed national parks, then it would not be corporate welfare. Since Disney has lobbyists who basically created the bill, you can be sure they're going to want to be in the ads.

I agree that a lot of Libertarianism is so extreme, that it brings things down to funding roads and the military. I think if there are people in need, who will drown without assistance, then that is government money well spent. It speaks to who we are as a society, and about bringing all people up, not just the wealthy. So I am not that kind of Libertarian. But I do think that there are budgetary choices to make, and I am not sure that this one is worth it, and if it is essentially a $200 million ad campaign for Disney (which is not completely clear yet), then that is wrong and is fleecing foreigners for a corporation. If it was we the U.S. taxpayers forking out the money, this bill would already be dead.

[karynnj]

19. My answers would be -

1) No, in the sense that not doing it would lead to no crisis
2) Advertising can help. Given that many countries do it, many have been persuaded that it is effective. I am sure that they have studied the impact - just as consumer companies do in the US. If the ads are good enough they can stimulate some to think about the US rather than an alternative country.

[beachmom]

20. A few responses after some research:

First, everyone should read the WP article. It is not a hit piece on Democrats. It's a "sausage making" article, and yeah, it makes one want to become a vegetarian. It also does not even mention John Kerry at all. Markos inexplicably did. There was such an agency, but Newt Gingrich killed it. However, it was set up in a way where it was easily "killable":

In December, Freeman and his team labored to hammer the blueprint into shape and also to line up congressional backers. Chief among the lawmakers they courted was Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee chairman with tourism in his purview. Five days before Christmas, Freeman and several other lobbyists met with Dorgan in an ornate room near the Senate floor. According to Freeman and others at the meeting, Freeman explained that they had developed a multimillion-dollar campaign to help "give you cover," and he added: "While you're walking the halls of Congress, we'll be working the media. We'll be working opinion leaders. We'll also be doing research. We'll be making this issue front and center."

Dorgan was impressed and promised to make the issue his own. But an old friend of Dorgan's, Greg Farmer, who attended the meeting, injected some skepticism. Farmer had headed the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration at the Commerce Department that Gingrich had axed. He noted that the partnership's plan still had a significant hole: its funding mechanism. He also noted how difficult it always had been to get the government behind an advertising campaign. "I still have the bruises," Farmer said.

I also want to point out that this is not a Democrat vs. Republican issue. Tom Ridge ended up being a chief lobbyist for this bill. The Bush Administration opposed it. Republican Roy Blunt co-sponsored it. So it's kind of all over the place.

This part addresses my concerns:

By the time the holidays were over, the lobbying team had produced a 56-page legislative blueprint that laid out the partnership's three goals: visa reform, making airports more welcoming and "travel promotion," a more lawmaker-friendly phrase the team had decided to substitute for "destination marketing." Rather than choosing a single way to pay for the $200 million advertising campaign, the consultants presented a menu of three options that Congress could enact. One was a $5 airline departure tax that was already causing consternation among U.S. carriers. The other two were a special bond issued by the government and a so-called visa waiver fee, which would be paid by foreigners from South Korea, Greece and other countries who didn't need visas to visit the United States.

What costs money is the advertising campaign. The airline industry killed any fees put on plane tickets. So now the "visa waiver fee", which is a bit of a euphemism, was what ended up in the bill.

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/24/annals-of-stupid-lawmaking

This guy thinks it will NOT promote tourism because foreigners will figure out that they are being price gouged.

I was at a sort-of DC power lunch yesterday with staffers from the Hill (the first such lunch I’ve ever gone to, and likely to be the last for a while), and the conversation turned to a piece of legislation that’s being pushed hard by lobbyists for big players in the tourism industry, the so-called Travel Promotion Act. The Act is supposed to create a $200 million fund to promote tourism, by levying a charge on visitors to the US. The charge is non-trivial – the estimates I heard suggested that in order to raise $10 a head to give to the travel industry’s promotional fund, the government will likely have to impose a total fee of $25 to cover administrative overheads.

This seems to me to be one of the more straightforwardly stupid legislative proposals of the recent past. As someone who used to visit the US a lot before I became a permanent resident, I can testify that I would have found it extremely galling to have to fork over $25 to subsidize glossy brochures for the US tourist industry, and would have likely restricted my travel to the US as a result. For that matter, I’ve heard strong resentment expressed by US citizens who have to pay similar fees when they visit certain countries in Latin America. Even so, it sounds as though the bill has a lot of support – 44 senators are co-sponsoring it already.

What really turns my stomach is that Disney is the one pushing this bill.

Guys, we are at war, in a mountain of debt, and have nearly 50 million people without insurance. Everything is choice. Every dollar is a choice. Karynnj has made some good arguments for advertising but frankly, I don't see why Disney can't do it themselves. Same with tourist attractions sites in Massachusetts.

To be clear, parts of the bill are good, including anything to make tourists' time spent going through immigration/customs through the airport more pleasant. But as far as I can see, that doesn't cost a dime.

Finally, Markos is full of it. Disney did not buy John Kerry. For $200 million? Sheesh, it would take a hell of a lot more for him to "sell out", as in there isn't enough money in the world.

[wisteria]

22. I like your comments on Markos. He is often full of it when he discusses or accuses Kerry of

anything.