Replies

I wonder how they plan to enforce this as many foreign visitors are driving rental cars with U.S. plates and they only ask for photo I.D. if you produce an annual pass (the America-the-Beautiful pass was $80 and now it will be $250, that gets you into all parks for a year after purchase, a real bargain even when daily entrance fees were $30 to $50 for the more popular parks). I read that the daily fees for those selected higher-volume parks will increase to $100 for foreign visitors. I think all that’s going to do is to shorten visits to one day which will then have an impact on nearby and in-park businesses, so once again, it’s not classic economics at work here. I don’t mind paying a bit extra as a non-taxpayer but $100 a day is going to be a strong deterrent and frankly I don’t see any economic sense in it, clearly the MAGA base have regular tourists and dangerous illegal immigrants confused. 99% of tourists plan to go home and not overstay their welcome, why take out the frustrations on us when it’s people from various other countries that don’t plan to visit your national parks who are causing all the problems?

The $250 annual pass is fair enough, I would say, but at some point these counter-intuitive economic programs are going to crash the economy altogether rather than making anybody great again, it may make it the 1930s again. The Democrats will love that.