Hugh J. Campbell of the United Steelworkers (USW) sends us this blog. 

In the article, "You Built That: How Mitt Romney Shook Down American Taxpayers for His Welfare Olympics," Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele say Mitt Romney’s take-take-take mentality is nothing more than the old-fashioned double standard: If it enhances the standard of living of his cronies, it’s business as usual.

Many records were set at the 2002 Winter Games, but chances are the one that Mitt Romney set will never be broken. It’s the amount of federal dollars that Romney and his crew siphoned out of the U.S. Treasury to help pay for the Olympic Games: $1.5 billion. That was more than the federal government had spent on all seven Olympic Games held in the United States since 1904—combined, adjusted for inflation.

Romney & Co. took a page from the private equity funds playbook, a strategy popular with the moneymen known as using OPM—other people’s money. This using OPM is also the strategy of his partisan peers, every time there is a recession. They believe they have an entitlement to tax cuts to "jump start" the economy; tax-cuts they are unwilling to relinquish after the economy recovers. Their philosophy is: “Tax-cuts are forever.”

The outlandish amount of money it took to underwrite the Olympic Games undermines the image that Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, are trying to portray as stalwarts of a frugal government that disavows subsidies.