But they are seen and used by millions of Americans every day, which has helped leagues counter the perception that sports teams are wasteful enterprises and in fact can convey socially responsible messages to fans of all political and economic stripes.
To the very poor, on the other hand, even drinking tea is a wasteful extravagance.And what of enterprise?
Overcoming those obstacles will serve as one test of Mr Xi's reform credentials.State enterprises are another source of wasteful investment.
Behind a smoother-looking balance sheet, wasteful, politically directed lending to dud state-owned enterprises continued.
They have poured money into wasteful infrastructure projects and kept broken state-owned enterprises (SOEs) afloat.
Populist subsidies have more beneficiaries and therefore more friends, but the argument against them is similar: they weaken the state and largely bypass the needy.Re-engineering the state would reduce deficits, spur enterprise and allow resources to move from wasteful activities to productive ones.
New measures have been agreed to that should broaden the tax base and eliminate wasteful spending, particularly in the areas of health care, state enterprises and tax administration, the inspectors added.
There is little talk of cutting red tape, privatising state-owned enterprises or slimming the obese public sector, nor have officials contemplated phasing out wasteful and badly targeted subsidies.
"Teaching writing," a phrase she placed in quotation marks, still seemed a dubious enterprise: "Group reading, group discussion, all this going over and over and over, usually strikes me as a wasteful form of time-passing or therapy, with little or no connection to writing," she once groused in an evaluation written for an M.I.T. creative-writing instructor under review.
