Tourism is the opposite of sucking money from the local populace? It's a cultural landmark that, iirc, draws in a million tourists per year.

I kind am torn about your reasoning, but I understand it myself. If science and technology was paraded XYZ years earlier, wouldn't things be so much better? Except it's not that easy. Dumping a ton of gold in a pre-medieval economy is worthless. Dumping the right ideas instead (renaissance, medicine, industrialisation) would have been priceless. Though, I wonder, what could have happened if instead people were taxed 10% they invested that in other means -- wouldn't it be nice if it had compounded over all those years...