The International Olympic Committee will determine today who will host the summer games of 2016.
Frontrunners for the prestigious honor include: Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo.
Usually the Olympic Games are an extraordinary opportunity to display a city to the rest of the world on the largest stage, and the revenue generated by such a grandiose event is tremendous.
In such a dire economic climate, one would think that this would be a no-brainer for President Barack Obama to make a strong plea for his former hometown of Chicago to host the games.
But his recent trip to Copenhagen to try and woo the IOC is actually a terrible idea if one looks back at recent expenditures of former host cities.
Athens projected a cost of $1.6 billion in 2004 and ended up footing the bill at the tune of $16 billion.
More recently, the Beijing games that were hailed as a huge success predicted the same figure as Athens and wound up paying $40 billion.
So, in this fledgling economy, shouldn’t our president reorganize his priorities and try to resolve the war he is fighting on two fronts, as well as a health care system in shambles, instead of taking trips to Denmark?
