"Ah," the huckster replies, "I was hoping you'd ask me that. The reason you want to do this is for all the 'economic development' you'd spur at your new location. Why, think of the benefit to the new grocery store you'd shop at, the new dry cleaners you'd patronize, the phone and cable TV and electric companies you'd sign up with."

At this point, you're free to declare this scheme completely bonkers. The cable TV and electric companies you'd deal with would be precisely the same ones you deal with now, as would the dry cleaners. And even if you did switch groceries, the new "economic stimulus" you deliver to one would simply be removed from another. In fact, given that this deal would leave you $100,000 poorer, it's a good bet you'd be able to do a whole lot less "stimulating," overall.

Yet multiply these numbers a thousandfold, and you've got the money-losing "new City Hall" deal the Las Vegas City Council will consider today -- despite the fact the city budget is currently stretched so tight they're cutting back hours at public recreation centers.

The plan calls for abandoning the current 276,000-square-foot City Hall -- built in 1973, still perfectly adequate, and likely to have surplus space if and when the Metropolitan Police Department moves to new quarters -- to build a new City Hall less than a mile to the southwest, at the site of the derelict Queen of Hearts casino on First Street between Lewis and Clark avenues.

City Finance Director Mark Vincent says selling the current City Hall site should bring between $51 million and $81 million, though such a return cannot be guaranteed in today's "soft" real estate market. (In fact, if this deal goes through, watch for the old City Hall to remain in govenrment hands, making the whole scheme a dead loss.)

Building the new City Hall? An estimated $150 million. And if such a government construction project has come in under budget around these parts since the last time the Hindenburg docked at Lakehurst, please remind us when.

No one claims the current City Hall is inadequate. No, this is all being sold as an "economic stimulus" for the downtown -- a relocation of the City Hall such a short distance from the current site that workers will still be able to walk to some of the same lunch spots they frequent today.

The suspicion begins to take root that someone stands to make a hefty profit off this deal, and it ain't the taxpayers.

Now, "profit" isn't a dirty word around here. But a legitimate profit comes from selling something to willing buyers. And taxpayers, by definition, do not part with their money willingly.

Leave this loot in the hands of Las Vegas residents by lowering taxes and they will spend it frugally, rewarding the merchants who provide them with the best products and services in the most convenient locations at the best prices -- the kind of merchants who can stay in business and pay their taxes without "subsidies."

The problem with government is -- once it has its hands on all this tax loot -- it operates under none of the same real-world strictures.

Let the average Las Vegan waste this big a chunk of change, and the electricity gets turned off. There's no food on the table.

But the City Council can talk about shuttling City Hall around town as blithely as a Monopoly player builds a hotel on the Boardwalk. If the idea proves to be a disaster and the political class runs short of dough, they can always raise taxes again -- it's no loss from their wallets.

To them, it's all "just pretend."