Nashville's Convention Center

The city of Nashville (the author's hometown) is proposing a new convention center with a cost estimated at half a billion dollars (which will surely be exceeded). This expenditure at a time of economic contraction is foolhardy. Las Vegas with every attraction in the world can not sustain convention business and tourism. How can Nashville, without even a theme park hope to compete with the Orlandos and gambling capitals of America and the world? This over-ambitious project will create some temporary construction jobs, largely no doubt, filled by illegal aliens who dominate the construction industry here (the labor pool for construction, anyway). This may seem like inside baseball for non-Tennesseans, but inevitably Federal dollars are diverted for a project this enormous. Besides, this sort of New Deal stimulus spending will spread all over the nation unless we stand in the way now.