I was directed to this Harvard Law blog post via Seth Godin, which highlights the truly staggering cost of staging an Olympic Games. Here is a nice excerpt from the aforementioned blog:
“…it seems reasonable to assume that the Olympics (in Chicago) would have cost at least $5 billion. That would be enough to finance a great engineering college, an online university serving tens of thousands of students, an electric car manufacturer, a bunch of high-tech businesses, a free wireless Internet covering the entire city, and still have a lot left over. Unless taxpayer dollars were truly unlimited, could anyone minding the long-term best interests of citizens choose to spend that money on a two-week spectacle?”
Given that the 2012 Olympic Games are in London, it will be interesting to see the fallout from financing the Olympics. Already the London 2012 cost estimate is significantly over budget and is now £9.3billion (vs. the initial estimate of £2.4 billion), so the trend continues:
Hosting the Olympics is an expensive proposition that taxpayers finance with funds and resources that can be deployed for much more productive uses: education, social services, hunger prevention, infrastructure development, safety & crime prevention
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