The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) announced Thursday that
Boston—or rather, ““—had snagged America’s
nomination for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
Why would any city want to host the Olympics in the first place?
The bids are generally driven by politicians, who are motivated by
a combination of delusions of economic prosperity and selfish
desires to have a feather in their caps for landing an
Olympics.
Massachusetts is , and now its capital city will
campaigning for the right to spend billions
on an event that have
shown .
While Boston’s campaign centered on its frugality and private
funding—the bid promises a budget of “only” —this kind of rhetoric was thrown around by
organizers of the Athens, Vancouver, and London Games too.
Surprise: Those events wound up costing national and city
governments billions more than predicted.
Olympics historically run . Recently, the 2012 London Games cost three
times more than anticipated, after promising only $4 billion in
expenses. And the price for February’s 2014 Sochi games? A whopping
$51 billion—more than the entire cost of every previous Winter
Olympic Games combined. Boston doesn’t exactly have a stellar
history of saving money on major construction projects, as
evidenced by the $14.6 billion boondoggle “Big Dig,” which overran
costs by 190 percent and finished nine years later than
expected.
Economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of the book Circus
Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the
World Cup, and said, “More often that not,
Olympics wind up as a public burden…I have no reason to believe
that Boston will be an exception rather than the rule.”
Along with the obvious costs like construction and security,
Olympics also require a multitude of other expenses. (No word on
whether or not Boston has agreed to pay for of a free
cocktail party, Samsung phones, furniture with an “Olympic
appearance,” or to have IOC members “received with a smile on
arrival at hotel.”)
Here is how the protest group “” puts
it:
A Boston Olympics would divert resources from education,
healthcare, transportation, and open space—all to throw an
extravagant party for the unelected, unaccountable members of the
International Olympic Committee.
Boston will also compete for the right to burden its residents
with large doses of eminent domain, heavy traffic, and a wide
variety of civil liberties violations in what Reason’s Jesse Walker
calls “.” (The USOC was reportedly impressed by Boston’s
in the wake
of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.)
Meanwhile, the IOC is struggling to find a bidder for the 2022
Winter Olympics, with only two cities—Almaty, Kazakhstan, and
Beijing, China, both run by repressive authoritarian
governments—willing to step up for hosting contention.
Until the International Olympic Committee agrees to pay its own
way—IOC took in over in the most recent four-year Olympic
cycle—the Games are a terrible corporate welfare scheme for any
city.
Until then, let’s wish Boston bad luck in the contest to host
the 2024 Olympic Games.
The same reasoning applies to the hosting of a National Football
League (NFL) team, too, with 87 percent of stadium financing coming
straight from the pockets of taxpayers: