One wonders just what Mitt Romney is thinking these days, arguing how it would be just dandy for Boston to blow tens of millions to mount a long-shot Olympic bid.

That, in fact, chasing after the Olympics could be a “marvelous community-building” experience for the perpetually cash-strapped Hub.

Ditto for construction mogul John Fish, Robert Kraft, and a number of otherwise typically sharp and sober business leaders who have been touting the half-baked idea that Boston should compete for the right to host the 2024 Summer Games.

Given who will be picking up the tab in the end, “community billing” – or just outright highway robbery – might be closer to the truth.

Anyone who thinks Greater Boston is going to rally around a proposal that, if successful, would require a multibillion-dollar infrastructure overhaul, including a new sports stadium, needs a crash course in the basic realities of Massachusetts development, better known as NIMBY 101.

A proposal, mind you, that could drain local corporate and public coffers of more than $70 million just in order to mount a bid. And no, the International Olympic Committee does not give out refunds to losing cities.

But our former governor and presidential runner-up either has far too much time on his hands these days or has been simply gone too long to remember what it’s really like here in Massachusetts, the graveyard of ambitious development.

That is, if he was ever really here, mentally that is, what with all the ultimately futile presidential scheming and plotting he did during his short tenure on Beacon Hill.

New Stadium Nonsense

To be honest, I almost fell over when I heard the Boston Olympic bid idea, and that otherwise sane individuals were endorsing it, given the requirement of a brand news sports stadium.

There’s a long and tortured history of sports stadium proposals in the Boston area, with the debate inevitably degenerating into a lunatic circus of over-the-top opponents and overwrought, obsessive media coverage.

Having covered a few of these, it’s a subject I know all too well.

A decade of State House debate yielded the TD Garden, which has to be the absolutely ugliest sports box in the country, while the Red Sox, after decades of debate and various plans that went nowhere, wound up wisely settling for a modest revamp under new ownership.

Bob Kraft wound up having to sign a deal to move to Hartford before he could get the state to chip in with some modest roadwork on Route 1, building Gillette Stadium with his own money.

Of course, we also would need to build an “Olympic Village” to house thousands of athletes from across the world. And, oh, by the way, dorms won’t do.

Given the allergic reactions neighborhoods and towns across the state have to any sort of housing proposal, I am just sure there will be no end of communities rushing to donate land for this venture.

You can imagine all the cranks railing about being subjected to late-night carousing by rowdy athletes. Not just a few hundred but 16,000 of them, including some from regimes that surely the good folks in Cambridge will be all up in arms over.

The flood of projects to be reviewed would surely cause the already slow-as-molasses Boston Redevelopment Authority to completely sieze up.

And of course, we would also need an overhaul of the cash-strapped MBTA to move about the equivalent of a peak Super Bowl crowd, every day, for weeks.

Right now, our pathetic and completely broke public transit system is simply struggling to have trains show up on time, or, in some cases, show up at all.

About the only the thing T has been able to accomplish over the past few years is boosting fares, incredibly making it more expensive, in an era of sky-high gas prices, to take the train than drive your car to work.

Crazy, Crazy Money

And what will it all cost? Well, the price-tag for all of these projects would likely top $15 billion – on par with the Big Dig, and we all know what kind of a root canal that was for taxpayers here and across the country.

But maybe most galling of all, we could spend tens of millions just to compete for the 2024 games and not get anything for it.

That’s what happened with Chicago – it blew $72 million just to get eliminated in the first round.

Of course, this would be a field day for stale pols like Romney, who just can’t seem to leave us all alone, and for public relations and marketing firms across Boston and the country, who will gorge on all the phony work this phony project will spin off.

And who will pay for all this nonsense?

If you haven’t guessed it, already hard-up taxpayers and businesses that can’t turn around without getting hit up again for a contribution for yet another pie the sky proposal or cause.

Of course, the apologists are saying it all might be a useful exercise to go through. After all, it could help us identify and come to grips with our failing public transportation system and other infrastructure issues, they argue.

Maybe, but is there not another, lower cost way of finding out what we probably already know?

After all, I hardly think we need to turn over $70 million to Mitt and his fellow tycoons to be told the T sucks or that we have issues with big projects.

Let’s take a pass on that one.

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.