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Hideous is the Post’s continued cheerleading for ever-larger public handouts to the state’s tourism industry. Saturday’s editorial, Tourism pays off for Denver, was spiked with nonsense, starting with the opening sentence that read, “The adage ‘it takes money to make money’ proved true in Denver last year". To be accurate the adage needs updating to read, “you can make an even bigger boat load of money in Denver if you can hoodwink the public into pay your advertising costs.” And how much did the state’s struggling tourism industry make last year? Why, according to reports elsewhere in the Denver papers, they grossed over $8 billion. So did they really need our $19 million in advertising handouts? Wasn’t a new convention center complex built with taxpayer money and $4 million for marketing enough? Did the legislature really need to rob $15 million from Referendum C money to tout the state for the Marriott and the Hilton clans? Did anyone mention this intention when we were implored to vote for C to save our schools? No, of course not. But of course neither did the ruling elites and their newspapers warn us there was a glitch in state law that wouldn’t even allow much of the Referendum C money to go to schools. Instead it had to go to highways. Thus Referendum D, which asked for around $600 million in additional public funding for highways, though roundly defeated by the voters, is to be largely funded through C. Clever those politicians and their friends on editorial boards.
“Nothing so much resembles a swelling as a hollow,” though a somewhat less known adage from St. Beuve, seems more appropriate to the issue at hand, for where one stands on issues of public spending depends, apparently, on one’s point of view or, more accurately, one’s sense of the public good. This letter has not been edited.
READER COMMENTS
Thats nothing. You want to talk about abuse and favoritism toward the tourism industry try checking out CDOT. When October 1st comes around untill May 1st, they are at the becking call of Ski Country USA. Plowing parking lots (winterpark, bertha, among others) in order to maintain a profiet for the ski industry who is openly funded every year by tax dollars. Especially when they have a bad season. Never once paying a dime back to the tax payer who pays like in collage a higher rate for living here.
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