“This study shows the tremendous opportunity we have to support jobs, open doors for local businesses, and drive investments that strengthen communities across Los Angeles,” Reynold Hoover, chief executive of LA28, said in a statement.

That’s a lot of billions, even if “increased output” just means counting up all the Olympic-related spending, meaning LA28 is partly taking credit for how much money it’s pouring into preparing for the 2028 Games. The actual report, though, indicates that this was hardly an exhaustive study: The high end figure was generated by plugging Olympic spending numbers into IMPLAN, a software package that pretty much just takes whatever figures you give it and adds a multiplier. The low end is from a calculator by the International Academy of Sport Science and Technology (which goes by its French acronym, AISTS) that supposedly “counts only money genuinely new to the region—spending injected from outside.” That’s better, but not only does it still count building temporary venues that will then be torn down as an economic plus, it also still doesn’t account for displacement of spending from locals who flee town and non-Olympic tourists who steer clear as a result, which has been a major problem in past Games.

A far better analysis would look at how actual economic indicators have gone during past Olympics, and the L.A. Times hints at one place to start: “An economic forecast by a think tank before the 2024 Games projected the Paris Olympics would generate up to $12.8 billion in net economic benefits. But government auditors concluded in 2025 that the Olympics injected a more modest $2.3 billion into the economy, an almost negligible increase in the nation’s gross domestic product.”

A study of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics and 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics found similar results: While “hotel prices rose precipitously,” authors Philip K. Porter and Deborah Fletcher wrote, there was no evidence of increased consumer spending during the events compared to other years. And Porter and Fletcher specifically called out “the misapplication of regional input-output (I-O) models to one-time-only events like the Olympic Games that draw huge audiences to a region for a short period of time,” calling the lure of IMPLAN- and AISTS-type models “a recipe for mistakes: one part profit, one part easy economic forecast, and one part naiveté yields a host of economic impact studies that are wholly inaccurate and misleading.”

This is pretty much garbage-in, garbage-out, in other words. Combine that with the issue that the private nonprofit LA28 refuses to tell anyone what it’s actually spending on or bringing in from the Olympics, and it’s still very likely that L.A.-area taxpayers will end up losing billions of dollars on the 2028 Games when all is said and done. We won’t know until it’s all over; and even then, that’s assuming that LA28 doesn’t take the preemptive step of burning its financial records to ensure no one can see them, as happened in Nagano in 1998.