If you look at, for instance, the NYT blog comments on this topic, you’ll see a combination of Europeans who are livid about it, and Americans who are unaware of it. You’ll also find lots of people for whom this is the last straw, given the advent of pre-clearance and photo/fingerprint-scanning for visa waiver visitors, increasingly arduous and Kafkaesque bureaucracy for visitors requiring visas, and the whole being-treated-like-criminals on arrival.

Visa waiver nations ought to require all advertising covered by the TPA fee carry a large notice saying that should you decide to visit the USA, you’ll be paying directly for future ads of this nature.

This tourism tax will kill the entire US tourism business. Disneyworld and Universal will be the first to go. Admissions revenue at the national parks will collapse forcing the closure of many of them.

And when the tourism dollars vanish, so do the convention center dollars.

This completely unsustainable tax should be known as the death tax because it is going to cause the death of the US tourism industry.

Well heck, if it really doesn’t, let’s charge a $25 fee which will go directly toward subsidies for health care, or maybe subsidize state budgets, or fund climate control initiatives, or maintain public attractions like state parks and monuments, or… whatever.

But… $25 in slush for tourism advertising? Really?

If all visitors to the US were tourists, this would cancel out neatly. The trick is that the tax will be levied on business visitors as well. So this is good for Disney, bad for business-oriented hotels and similar.

This is bad, period. There’s nothing in the Constitution about the United States of Disney.