Our nation continues to get the bills for Donald Trump's ever-open mouth, and the sticker price for his xenophobic frothing continues to be quite high, indeed.
Travel to the U.S. has been on the decline ever since President Donald Trump took office, and new data shows the slump translates to a cost of $4.6 billion in lost spending and 40,000 jobs.
The latest data from the National Travel and Tourism Office shows a 3.3 percent drop in travel spending and a 4 percent decline in inbound travel.
The downturn has also caused America to lose its spot as the world's second-most popular destination for foreign travel, ceding to Spain. (France is in first place).
Donald Trump could have funded a goodly part of his border wall for $4.6 billion, and he'd have to visit a maybe-closing-maybe-not factory every hour of every day of his administration, including the golf days, to make a dent in a loss of 40,000 jobs. And this is just the Asshole Tax: the repercussions in the travel industry due solely to Donald Trump not being able to control himself from making racist or xenophobic or just-plain-humiliating statements against the residents of every last country on Earth.
U.S. News and World Report notes that the U.S. has dropped in the "Best Country" rankings to eighth, "fueled by the world's perceptions of the country becoming less progressive and trustworthy," so it’s likely that next year’s economic costs will be even worse.
It's not often that a single man's piehole can cost 40,000 jobs. You have to be either very bad at your job or just very, very loud, but fortunately for Donald Trump those are the two things he excels at. Perhaps he can give those 40,000 people jobs at Mar-a-Lago; rather than suffering through the indignity of inauguration anniversary party guests having to scoop their caviar using plastic spoons, perhaps it can be fed to them egg-by-egg by a long line of laid-off American workers.