United States Capitol Police Administrative Technical Corrections Act of 2009
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Senator Dorgan for his great leadership. For so long, he has been working on this. I have a feeling this is finally going to get done. It is true and we invite the Presiding Officer to visit North Dakota and Minnesota. I think he thinks the State of New Mexico is pretty cool, but he has never been to Teddy Roosevelt Park in North Dakota.
So often marketing campaigns for our country are done by specific cities such as Las Vegas and New York, which is important. But when you look
at this country, marketing our country as a whole is going to mean something. We are competing against countries the world over that do this all the time. That is why we have seen a 20-percent decrease in international visitors.
When I held a hearing on this issue, along with former Senator Martinez, this past year, there was a story in the Washington Post, in good humor, about all the Senators hawking their own States and the deals you could get--whether it was Senator Begich's $99 cruise in Alaska or the stuff I talked about with Duluth, MN. We were doing that because people need to know about the opportunities in America. Doing it at a Commerce Committee hearing is not going to be anything compared to what France, Indonesia, and other countries are doing. They are bringing in visitors. They spend thousands and thousands of dollars.
We are doing this jobs bill this week, and an important part of that is the travel industry because it employs one out of eight Americans.
What will this bill do? One, as Senator Dorgan mentioned, it will give us the ability to market our country. Second, it will give us the funds we need to better process the visas because it is expected to bring in--and this is the estimate of the nonpartisan organization--1.6 million new international visitors each year. They spend $4,500 on average when they come here. You can do the math--1.6 million new visitors times $4,500 every single year. There is some expectation that the bill could generate $4 billion in new spending and $321 million in Federal tax revenue. In addition, the bill is estimated to create 41,000 new jobs.
What is the cost to the taxpayer? I have been pushing on deficit reduction, but what is the cost to the taxpayer? Zero. I think that is a great thing about this bill. We are doing something to create jobs. We are doing it at zero cost. As you know, there is a small fee on foreign visitors to our country, like other countries do to our people when they visit--with Canada exempted.
What I found out is that the people who care about this bill are not just in the Halls of Congress and in our major cities. When I was in Grand Marais, International Falls, Bemidji, and the Brainerd Lakes area--home of the statue of Paul Bunion and Babe the Blue Ox--they were excited about this because they have seen a decrease in visitors from Canada. They want to be able to market our country.
We have gotten so far behind. A lot of people living in, say, France are deciding where to go on their summer vacation. They are thinking: Am I going to go to America, where maybe it will take months to process my visa, or am I going to spend my vacation in England, just across the channel or maybe I will go to Mexico. That is what is happening. That is where we have lost 20 percent of the overseas travel.
Look at this chart. There were 48 million more global overseas travelers in 2008 than in 2000. More people are traveling. We have seen the marketing power across this world. There were 633,000 fewer who have visited the United States than in 2000. So world travel is going up. You can see the big increase globally. But the number of people coming to the United States has gone down. That means less jobs in this country.
Mr. President, I believe we need to be on an equal playing field with the rest of the world. If we want to compete in our goods that we want to produce and send overseas, we also have to compete in the tourism market. In Duluth, MN, it was hard times in the 1980s. It was so bad that they put up a billboard that said:
Will the last person to leave turn off the lights.
They rebuilt because they were smart; the businesses were smart about tourism. They have beautiful Lake Superior right there. When we did a tourism hearing--a field hearing there--they were talking about, obviously, how in many areas of the country, with the recession, business in convention centers had gone down nationally, and someone whispered, ``Ours has gone up.'' People are looking for different things, and maybe we will have our convention in Duluth, which is a little less expensive. They can look at Lake Superior instead of looking at the Pacific Ocean.
We are proud of this country, and we want other people to visit. We want them to spend their money in America and help create 41,000 new jobs. That is what this bill is about. I am very hopeful that we are going to finally get this bill passed and support the tourism part of our economy, which employs one in eight Americans. Let's keep it strong and going.
I see that Senator Dorgan is back. I thank him so much for his tremendous leadership. I am proud that I got the opportunity to take over the subcommittee that deals with tourism. A lot of the work had been done on this bill.
I yield the floor.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source