Quote Originally Posted by bubba
Hosting an Olymics is always a losing proposition. You never get back the cost of the facilities and they usually end up being a white elephant for the host city. I don't understand the need for prestige that calls for picking the publics pocket like that.
It's the same concept as building a mammoth sports stadium with the public's money so that a major league team owned by billionaires can play there and make profits. It makes no sense to me. Why should tax dollars from poor people go to building a stadium that is given to a rich person?

The new baseball stadium in DC is a case in point. The idiotic supports of that boondoggle want to build a massive stadium entirely at public expense, with only a handful of days available to the city to use it, and let major league baseball lease it at absurdly low rates, without putting a penny into building it, and without sharing any of the revenues with the City. And the cost estimates keep going up. Last time I heard it was almost $600 million an climbing and apparently it will take several centuries at the current lease rate to make the money back. All this at a time when the city public schools are crumbling, many students didn't even receive their textbooks until Christmas time, the police force can't handle the growing crime problem, city streets appear to be engineered to increase business for automechanics because of the enormous number of potholes, city buildings are crumbling, the basic sewer and water infrastructure is archaic and a danger to public health, and the city is once again on the verge of going deep into debt. But they want the prestige of a major league team so badly that they're willing to abandon the taxpayers and line the pockets of the super-rich.