We should all give thanks for Taylor Swift

livemint.com:

Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.

Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023. This fact makes her a suitably international choice because when something good happens in America, boy is it worldwide news.

I have been following her famous Eras tour since it began in March. Everyone says she’s huge, she’s fabulous, but really it’s bigger than that. What she did this year is some kind of epic American story.

Here are the reasons she should be Person of the Year: Her tour has broken attendance and income records across the country. She has transformed the economy of every city she visits. The U.S.

Travel Association reported this fall that what her concertgoers spend in and around each venue “is on par with the Super Bowl, but this time it happened on 53 different nights in 20 different locations over the course of five months." Downtowns across the country—uniquely battered by the pandemic and the riots and demonstrations of 2020—are, while she is there, brought to life, with an influx of visitors and a local small business boom. Wherever she went it was like the past three years didn’t happen. When Ms.

Swift played Los Angeles for six sold-out nights in August she brought a reported $320 million local windfall with her, including 3,300 jobs and a $160 million increase in local earnings. From Straits Research this month: Ms. Swift’s tour is “an economic phenomenon that is