Made in the U.S.A. by John Dersham

Made in the U.S.A.

I attended a tourism conference last week in Oxford Mississippi. One of the topics was entitled “Extraordinary Results in Ordinary Communities” by Vaughn Grisham. He is currently the Director of the McLean Institute for Community Development and he is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi. His lecture was about developing tourism in extremely small rural towns. In his discussion he talked about the ever changing culture in our country and in the world. He gave some interesting statistics about our cultural shifts that I want to share with you. In 1800, 95% of the U.S. population was farmers and it was pretty much the same worldwide. 100% of the population lived in cities smaller than 50,000. This was because in 1800 there were no cities of 50,000 people. New York City was the largest city (still is) and New York City and all its boroughs were only 30,000 in population. Then came the industrial revolution and by 1959 nearly 50% of our population worked in manufacturing jobs of some type and 75 % of our population lived in cities. Now 15% work in manufacturing and more than 90% of our population lives in cities (including suburbs). The largest segment of our population now works in service related industries, food, retail, medical, information management, IT support and the largest of all industries in the US is tourism. Tourism brings the most dollars into local economies and employees the most people of any other industry in the U.S. Here is the good news for us. Tourism is 100% made in the U.S.A. and cannot be exported…ever. Tourists visiting DeKalb County every year provide my job and my staff’s, all the hotel/motel jobs, State and National Parks, attractions, museum’s, etc. Even a portion of the jobs at restaurants and mini markets are there due to tourism. These jobs cannot be exported. Last year 67 million dollars were spent by tourists visiting DeKalb County. This money brought in badly needed tax revenue and provides 171,000 jobs in Alabama, 29,000 jobs in North Alabama and nearly 1,500 jobs just in DeKalb County. Tourism is a Green Industry. It does not pollute the environment and the crime rate among tourists while on vacation is lower than local crime rates nationwide. It requires no local funding for schools, trash collection or other city services. The money coming in from tourism helps support our city and county governments so they get more money to support us that live here. In a time when our country is in dire need of jobs and income we are blessed to have tourism that remains strong and is growing. This year federal tourism programs hope to attract more international business than ever before. This will help bring more international income to the US economy.
Yeah Tourism!