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.
Trying to finance the upkeep & use of the parks. I get it.
I don’t know how they came up with these numbers, but the fees seem too high not to have a fairly significant effect on the number of foreign visitors, and therefore the revenues to small businesses in the towns that survive on the $ spent by those visitors. (estimates are about 15 million foreigner visitors/year)
Have you ever traveled internationally? Most countries soak the “foreign” traveler a lot to see their attractions. Poor people both here abroad don’t travel internationally and tour. We are talking about the relatively rich small percentage who travel internationally.