Nonny Mouse explains why people from civilized nations are not visiting the US any longer.

The travel and tourist industry is one of the United States’ biggest money-makers, generating $103 billion in tax revenue every year. Without this tax revenue, every American household would pay nearly $1,000 more in taxes every a year. But while the travel business is flourishing internationally, tourism to America has been on a steep decline, dropping 36 percent between 1992 and 2005, with a loss of $43 billion in 2005 alone. The nation’s international tourism balance of trade declined more than 70 percent over the past 10 years - from $26.3 billion in 1996 to $7.4 billion in 2005.

People are simply choosing to go elsewhere. But as a follow-on to Logan Murphy’s excellent post on the increasing invasion of privacy by the soon-to-be approved Passenger Name Record for passengers entering international airports, allow me to present a personal view into why tourists are deciding not to spend their money visiting the States.

By all means read the entire thing. It’s entertaining and frightening. The bigotry and xenophobia is growing, and it’s a feature, not a bug.

Of course all that lost income will eventually require government subsidies of the airlines, in order to make the CEOs of those companies mega-millionaires.