Vice Is Never A Good Gamble!

CASINO GAMBLE? A BAD BET AFTER ALL

Exclusive: Joseph Farah notes 'voluntary redistribution of wealth' hasn't been economic boon

Published: 19 hours ago

 JOSEPH FARAH About | Email | Archive

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As the Trump Plaza shuttered its doors this week in Atlantic City, the fourth casino in town to do so this year, the empty, short-lived promise of what gambling was going to do for cities and towns across America is now clear.

To say Atlantic City is worse off today than it was before the casino boom is an understatement. Unemployment is up. Crime is up. Tourism is down.

There were 12 casinos in town when the year started. There are eight left, but the contraction is not over. Trump Entertainment is threatening to close its last casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, Nov. 13 if it can’t get concessions from union workers.

No matter where you look across the United States, the story is the same.

• Five years after Ohio voters legalized casinos with promises of 17,000 jobs, those numbers have never materialized. One of the big problems? As fast as casinos were legalized, so were other competing forms of gambling – cutting into the action, you might say.
• This week in Biloxi, Mississippi, the Margaritaville Casino closed its doors for the last time.
• The story is the same in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania where big-box casinos have been struggling for years.
• Massachusetts, set to enter the casino sweepstakes in a big way this year, is proceeding with sharply reduced expectations.

Is this really such a shock – that voluntary redistribution of wealth does not have staying power, especially in weak economies?

Bob Stupak, the late Vegas casino owner, once said: “It’s our duty to extract as much money from the customer as we can and send them home with a smile on their face.”

But Abraham Lincoln before him reputedly said: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Today’s politicians don’t seem to be getting the message. In response to the Atlantic City disaster, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the answer is building more casinos – just closer to the New York metro area.

Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sees that plan cutting into his action and his plan to build four Las Vegas-style casinos north of Westchester.

How about we just focus on creating some wealth rather than move it around? How about actually improving people’s lives rather than turn them into casino zombies? How about giving entrepreneurs with ideas that will benefit humanity the kind of tax breaks casinos have been getting for too long?

Look, I don’t personally have anything against gambling. I don’t think it’s a sin. But it does drive many people to distraction and ruin. There’s nothing positive about it. So why is government at every level pushing it on us – in the form of casinos, lotteries and other forms?

Government is always promising taxpayers that gambling is going to be a panacea. It’s going to lower their taxes, improve their schools, improve the economy. The truth is you can’t point to a single example of this working in the long scheme of things. Even Las Vegas has imploded in one generation.

It should be obvious by now to one and all – even politicians.

But they are a breed particularly slow in the discernment department. They are bankrupt of new ideas. They keep playing the same hand over and over again.

There’s no way around it. You are never going to build a prosperous and healthy society of self-governing people on the back of a gambling economy.

Would that be pretty obvious even without these experiments?