Hey, #22, I am afraid that you keep turning around data on its head few times. Once you do that, you then make even wilder conclusions, and the way you put it, is not even funny.

Just a few points:
1) The original snippet of information referring to 17% decline I think comes from older data, does not refer to year 2006 but I think 2005 or 2003. I think it came from a press release of Department of Commerce ( I think).

2) Nowhere in the article it is said that US response to 9/11 cost $100bn. It said that "decline in tourism ...". The US response to 9/11 was not mentioned.

3) Your link refers to arrivals , NOT TOURISM arrivals. So they should not be treated as tourism numbers and come to conclusion that OK, there were 51 mil visitors in 2000 and 51 mil visitors in 2006. However, even from the number of overseas arrivals,it is very obvious that US tourism industry is struggling to attract visitors from Europe and Asia. The most striking is that recovery in numbers of visitors since 2001 is based mainly on Mexico arrivals which went up three millions (almost 30%) since 2000. Are you really sure that these ones are all tourists waiting to spend their money in US? Or are you serious saying that all Canadian arrivals are again only tourists?

4) In the comparison with growth in tourism worldwide, US tourism gets hammered, it is simple as that. While tourism worldwide is growing rapidly (somewhere I read there was a 38% increase in the tourism worldwide during the same time), the US arrivals stayed stagnant or show rather anaemic growth. Again this is if you exclude millions of Mexico and Canadian tourists. In my opinion, lost turnover is higher than $100 bn, especially considering weakness in US dollar.

5)Note about UK visitors not being representable for visitors from Europe is rather puzzling. UK visitors represented almost 43% visitors from whole Europe and actually was third largest group behinf Canada and Mexico. From the link given in your post, the decline of arrivals from UK is about 13% while from the whole western Europe it is ... guess what .... about 13% too. Not representing?????

Overall I have to say that US entry points, airports, staff, security have a very bad reputations among travellers. And it is impossible to avoid being told or hear some unpleasant stories which certainly do not make you to want to visit US in the near future. I would say much worse than perception on quality of American cars few years back, and that says a lot.