Many of us know that Obamacare will be very expensive and that supporters, aided and abetted by the Congressional Budget Office, deliberately low-balled the cost estimates.
I’ve also cited my Cato colleague Chris Edwards, who has made a more comprehensive (and well-documented) claim that government officials systematically lie about the cost of new projects.
Now we have a rather remarkable example of this fiscal prevarication from across the ocean.
In 2002, the British government estimated the cost of hosting the Olympic Games at $2.8 billion. Ten years later, the price has passed $15 billion and is still rising. When everything is added up — lost business, as many as 13,500 British soldiers patrolling the streets of London (more than are in Afghanistan) — the expenses may come to $38 billion.
Wow, cost overruns of somewhere between 500 percent and 1300 percent. That’s bad, even by government standards.
Though I imagine that moronic advocates of Keynesian economics will argue that the $15 billion-$38 billion is a form of stimulus that will percolate through the economy – conveniently forgetting that the money had to be taxed and borrowed from the private economy in the first place.
P.S. The top cartoon in this post is a good description of how government officials come up with their fiscal estimates.
I’ve nothing to add in regards to pigs at the trough, but happy Father’s day to you.
the Chinese spent $38 Billion and remaining they have the literally unused
Birds’ Nest” and other stadia, but compare that with the Obama High Speed Train to nowhere. “Bullet train from LA to Frisco” $3 Billion Stimulus; Cal. voters passed another $10 Billion in bond issue; another $7 in stimulus promised. Prep is just starting and already the Ca. authority says “well maybe it can go 125 mph and after the $11 Billion prep funds the first leg will be from FRESNO TO PASADENA (who the hell would ride that?) and the cost estimates have now gone from $61 Billion to over $121 Billion (plus destruction of olive groves, 90% of the nations almond crops and extensive livestock/agricultural areas and decades old working irrigation systems. See the CNN documentary on this…..
Central Planning in 1848
Cafe Hayek – 04/26/11 [edited]
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H.L. Mencken wrote about French central planning in 1848 by their best and brightest geniuses.
“Every day they announced some new and grander scheme to bring in the millennium, and every day they abandoned some busted one. Meanwhile, the plain people could not find jobs. The French taxpayer had to pay, in the end, for all of the crazy building of gaudy railway stations, dredging of rivers, and digging of canals.”
“The Brain Trust proposed that the Rotten Rich were scoundrels who ought to be squeezed. This proceeded easily to the thesis that any man was a scoundrel who had any property whatsoever, and he ought to be squeezed equally. The rich mostly managed to escape, but the little fellow could not get away, and squeezed he surely was.”
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H.L. Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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