Quote from TraderZones:
An amazingly one sided story. How much is the longterm promotional worth to Vancouver, now and in the future?
How many jobs did it create? How much money was added to the city in the buildup and the event and afterwards? How about future value from the new structures? Tourism?
If you ignore the benefits and focus on the cost, everything looks like a bad decision...
If you look at past Olympic games, none of those benefits offset the cost. Usually the Olympic village becomes a disused white elephant project. So effectively the host country takes on billions in debt for something that provides benefit for a few months at most. Consider for example the Montreal games in the 1970s - they city took on $1 billion in debt (back when that was a lot of money) and only paid it off in 2006. Do you think the benefit from that Olympics lasted for 3 decades? Lol. The Olympic stadium there is currently vacant, they can't even find a tenant. Effectively a whole generation of Montreal citizens were put in hock for a few weeks sporting entertainment. Or look at the more recent Athens games in 2004, it cost $9-12 billion and has contributed to Greece's current debt crisis. Is destroying the economy worth watching synchronised swimmers float in a pool, or seeing two people play ping pong? Australia are still paying off the debt of the 2002 games.
The current one will cost at least 6 billion, and most estimates beforehand turn out to be way below the real cost. Here are some estimates of what that 6 billion could buy:
http://no2010.com/node/842
More important to subsidize a few athletes for a month, or to build 6 permanent hospitals, or hire 3000 extra police for the city and pay them for 20 years? It's not even close.
If the Olympics was genuinely viable in economic terms, there would be no need to fund it via taxes - private companies or individuals would be falling over themselves to make a huge profit by hosting the games. And in fact when this was done in the USA for the LA games, it did turn a substantial profit.
The question is how governments can view it as acceptable to rape taxpayers, and put aside critical spending on saving lives or cutting crime, just so a few fitness fanatics can hop, skip and jump or parade on a ski slope for a few weeks. This is tyrannical extortion of the public to subsidize a privileged class that cannot earn an honest living by their own efforts. It is a self-aggrandizing ego-stroke for public officials, funded by the use of brutal armed force to extort and steal from the working man. Anyone who organizes an Olympics and funds it with taxes is a thieving extortionist and slaver who deserves to spend decades in jail.
