[NU Sports] Chicago Olympics 2016

[Jonathan Michael Hawkins]

Chuck--

Thanks for your message.

> Speaking as a Chicago suburbanite, it would be an incredible pain.

Speaking as a Chicagoan, you could stay at home in Elmhurst or Palos 
Heights or wherever you live and never even catch a whiff of the Olympics.

> Traffic is already murderous - no one wants any more congestion.

This is true, but it wouldn't affect intelligent spectators at the 
Olympics, who would intelligently choose to avoid congestion and ride the 
el.

> Today it was announced that the Chicago Public Schools may have to axe 
> 1000 teachers just to handle a sudden spike in teachers' pension costs.

This is irrelevant and utterly misleading.  They have to cut jobs because 
the teacher's union mismanaged their $10 billion pension fund and failed 
to cover their costs.  The city is required by law to make up the 
difference, which is forcing Chicago to let actually-teaching teachers go 
to pay for the pensions of old teacher's union teachers who are either 
unwilling to hire a successful fund manager or are too incompetent/corrupt 
to do so.

> Every city that has hosted an Olympiad has suffered huge losses.

Ask Peter Ueberroth about that.  And Billy Payne, to a (much) lesser 
extent.  Their Olympiads and Chicago have something in common, which is 
left as an exercise to the reader.

> Please - NO OLYMPICS EVER !

Now we get to the crux of the matter.  It's not Chicago bidding for the 
Olympics, it's the Olympics in general.  This is much like the hard-core 
socialists or, on the other side of the aisle, guys like Andrew 
Stuttaford.

Thanks for sharing, Chuck.

Best,

Jonathan