Anecdotal stories claim U.S. tourism has plummeted due to Republican tariffs and enforcing immigration the way Europe and Asia do, and it will ruin the American economy. 

If that was true, lawmakers in America's most Democratic state, Hawaii, wouldn't have added another tariff. This one aimed solely at tourists. 

SB 1396 added a whopping 11% tariff for cruise ships that dock in a Hawaiian port and increased the hotel tariff to 19% of the room rate. The Governor has already said he would sign it once his supermajority passes it. Tourists also pay a 5% extra tariff on everything just for breathing Hawaiian are.


You can tell the political party of a US state just by seeing how they vote. Republicans recently stole anti-vaccine beliefs from Democrats but the left still dominates on this one. It is bizarre to see poor local people on welfare rally around wealthy oligarchs like Pierce Brosnan who buy a plantation there and then demand that all science in the state stop. But that's politics, and it is just as weird to see Republicans pretend Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former NRDC lawyer who invented his own brain leakage diagnosis to get out of paying alimony to the woman he divorced because she objected to his rampant infidelity, speaks for all of them. 

The state says they will use the extra $100 million they expect the new tariff to raise to 'combat climate change' but that's just a way to make progressives feel like it is a social justice issue and not what it is. A financial shakedown.(1) They are also lying. Only 0.75% will go toward 'climate change.

Since you are reading here, you can do that math in your head. They are adding tariffs to tourists of $100,000,000 and only $750,000 of that will go toward the climate change reason the legislature claims they added it.

If increased costs will kill the local economy, as many in the US claim, Hawaii would not be piling on new tourism penalties. They instead believe that their market is too important for anyone to walk away.

It is a risky gamble, the same one President Trump made by retaliating against countries that placed tariffs on American good and got none in return.

Hawaii may be right. For most people, one trip to Hawaii and the quiet Haole Contempt that locals have for tourists is enough, and they will never go back. Since is is a one-time experience, a few thousand dollars extra may not matter.

Yet for now science still exists in Hawaii. The science community is done with the state after activists from the mainland mobilized local people into believing a telescope two miles in the air was some sacred violation, just as they ran astronomy out of the continental US. Those visiting scientists are still considered tourists even though they have a work visa, and continue to pay the tariffs.

NOTE:

(1) They claim it's not a tariff, it's a tax, but if it only applies to stuff from outside Hawaii, and it does, that's a tariff. And tariffs, as Europe and countries like Brazil and China know well after levying them against the United States for decades, work.