Sometimes someone writes something that is so good, so lucid and such a through and through skewering of mindlessly bad public policy that you just have to share it.
Witness James Freeman’s recent Wall Street Journal column about using “a tourist tax to attract tourists.”
He cites a Minneapolis Star-Tribune report about that city’s proposal to create a “Tourism Improvement District” that would implement a 2 percent fee on hotel rooms. The resulting take of about $6 million annually would be used for marketing, special projects and workforce development and training.
Pittsburgh and other cities do much the same thing. And many rationalize it by noting that locals don’t pay the tax, unless, that is, they rent a hotel room. It’s largely the “out-of-towners” who pay up, the tax and-spenders are wont to boast.
But The Journal’s Freeman puts this public policy perversion into proper perspective:
“For tourists and business travelers alike, it may seem almost too good to be true. All that visitors to Minneapolis have to do is fork over another $6 million and in return the locals will urge them to visit Minneapolis. No word yet on whether bookings have soared since the announcement of this bold new proposal.
“As long as visitors choose to stay at a fairly large lodging enterprise, it seems they’ll be able to participate in this exciting program.”
City Councilor Robin Wonsley, a Democratic Socialist and one of three ordinance sponsors, says Unite Here Local 17, the state’s hospitality union, also wants to ensure the ordinance increases investment in the hospitality workforce, so the tax revenue can be spent on workforce development and training, per the media account.
You just knew there was that sop to organized labor somewhere in this deal, didn’t you?
To which Freeman retorts: “(W)hat could do more to boost tourism than making tourism more expensive for tourists?”
But then Freeman’s skewer goes right to the heart of such public policy folly:
“Still, it does raise the question of why the new fee will be limited to 2 percent. Is there not even more boosting that could be done with a fee of 20 percent or 200 percent? Imagine the possibilities for Unite Here Local 17!”
As great admirers of skewering the nonsensical and free-market warping “Democratic Socialists” and unionistas that we are, we can only say “Hear! Hear!”
For this is good stuff. Really good stuff.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitue.org).
