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Originally Posted by Nodrog
For reference, social security spending in the UK is about 110 billion/year. So the money would probably just have been wasted on poor people anyway
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Milo's made this point but this is idiotic since a good proportion of this money will come from either additional taxation levied on London householders or through special lottery proceeds (which being a near monopoly is a form of government subsidy).
Besides, a good proportion of your £110bn figure is payment to pensioners. You might argue that these people should have their own private provision (and indeed some will do) but it seems perverse to tax people through their lifetimes into some form of national insurance and then effectively condemn their scrounging when they come to withdraw from it. There are numerous other arguments in defence of social spending even within the framework of a heavily capitalist society but I will not waste time repeating them here.
On the Olympics generally, they
could be a useful regeneration tool - the additional focus on an area means that capital heavy projects (like new transport links) are likely to finally get done and cost/benefit calculations change for redeveloping brownfield sites and the like. The problem is here, with London, is that it's largely unnecessary. It would have been useful twenty years ago and would probably be useful elsewhere in Britain, but London's construction market is already strong and house price inflation continues unabated. From speaking to people in the building trade recently I've been told that most of the Eastern European workers (from Poland etc) who have been manning a lot of building sites in the south-east the last couple of years are increasingly demanding higher rates of pay in line with "native" workers. So costs are starting to creep back up and wage inflation (depressed due to extra supply) is increasing. Maybe this will be a temporary thing but I'm not sure.
Either way. it'll be hugely costly but from a media / event point of view should be reasonably well run (unless there's some kind of "incident" like a bomb or something). The only possible benefit we (that is, London) could get is a couple of extra tube stops, an improved rail network in East London and some badly needed family sized houses (eventually). All of this could be provided at about a fifth of the price we will have to pay for it, but that's government project management for you.
Mainly it'll be a large subsidy paid primarily to people who are already top rate income-tax payers (that is the army of consultants, contract managers, construction firm owners, property speculators, media-types, senior civil servants, partnering strategists, etc who will be "needed" for such a project). Anyone who has analysed the practical execution of government spending on projects like this will of course find this entirely unsurprising.