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by toddmorey·5mo ago·view on hn ↗
It accounts for 3% of the economy and provides around 15 million jobs. That’s absolutely going to make a dent.

And international tourism supports local tourism. I think Las Vegas will continue to be a shell of what it was until international tourism rebounds.

BEA used to have these cool interactive tables on GDP by industry, but they’ve now been discontinued. It really feels like our current administration just does not like public data.

2 comments
Edit: I do think it’s fair to say our economy is much more diversified and resilient to a drop in tourism then a country like Spain where it’s closer to 20% GDP.

But maybe the right way to frame it is it wouldn’t be felt as much nationally, but international tourism drops are pretty catastrophic to local economies of some of our biggest cities like New York Miami and Los Angeles Angeles.

How much of that 3% is from foreign tourists versus domestic Americans?

And what types of jobs are those 15 million? High paid high skilled or low pay low skilled?

Because from what I can tell you about EU tourism jobs, most jobs tourism creates over here are low pay, hard labor, unskilled jobs, mostly filled by minimum wage migrant seasonal workers who then send the money back home, meaning the biggest beneficiaries from those jobs are the wealthy land/business owners who exploit cheap mirant labor, and not the local workforce who mostly suffers gentrification as they don't work in low pay tourist jobs and have to deal with increased rents from tourism on top.

Plus, the massive black economy tourism creates where a lot of the money is under the table and avoids the tax man further compounds to the problem. So I doubt much of the US working class will suffer from a tourism stagnation.

@HEmanZ: Did you read anything I said? Who's losing their job when almost all tourism jobs are done by foreign seasonal workers? The locals mostly aren't losing any job because they don't work in tourism due to pay and work conditions.

Are you using the same logic to cry for the western workers making clothes and sneakers who lost their jobs to Asian sweatshops? Do you think they miss that type of jobs and would want them back?

> How much of that 3% is from foreign tourists versus domestic Americans?

Probably all of it since tourism was 11% of total GDP in 2023, a third of that being international tourism would be on par with european averages.

Where did you get 11% GDP from. Google says 3%.
nvm i'm dumb, i can't read a chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/292518/contribution-of-t...

2023: 2.36T (i misread and took 2024 prediction)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the...

2023: 27.7

2.36 / 27.7 * 100 ~ 8.5

so 8.5 percent, not 11

I don't have a paid access to the website since 2021, so i can't look at the primary/secondary data, but it never failed me, and doesn't have the bias more political economic institutes has, so i mostly take data from there. If you have different data i will take them.

Ok so if that labor was someone’s job, that implies they couldn’t get something better for them. If you’re straight eliminating those jobs and now they have to take something even worse for them (lower pay, worse hours, worse personal satisfaction, etc)
Did you read anything I said? Who's losing their job when almost all tourism jobs are done by foreign seasonal workers? The locals mostly aren't losing any job because they don't work in tourism due to pay and work conditions.

Are you using the same logic to cry for the western workers making clothes and sneakers who lost their jobs to Asian sweatshops? Do you think they miss that type of jobs and would want them back?