A: The Massachusetts Council of Churches
B: The Amherst Democratic Town Committee
C: The Boston Business Journal
D: Some Lefty Blogger (like me.)
(The correct answer is at the bottom of this post.)
If you guessed correctly — you are the winner in the FrederickClarkson.com Sweepstakes! And unlike Governor Deval Patrick’s casino gambling proposal, what you get is nothing but satisfaction. The FrederickClarkson.com Sweepstakes has no history of causing addictive behaviors; bankrupsies; divorses — and has no known ties to organized crime!
The Boston Business Journal argues that we should all be responsible for fixing our roads and bridges rather than trying to scam the poor and the vulnerable. But beyond the social costs, the Journal also thinks it’s bad business — and bad for business.
As a matter of economic policy, expanded gambling is a non-starter. The commonwealth stands to skim $600 million off the top in licensing fees, one-time revenue that quickly becomes lost when it gets absorbed into $26.8 billion budget. Then it expects $400 million per year in additional tax revenue. But has anyone counted the taxes it won’t take in when $1.5 billion — the amount gamblers will need to spend in the state annually to raise the tax expected tax revenues — is sucked out of the local economy?
One of the fundamental fallacies of the casino revenue scheme is that casinos generate new money that falls out of the sky. No, most of this money simply won’t be spent elsewhere in Massachusetts. Perhaps $500 million will be redirected from Connecticut casinos. The rest is money Massachusetts residents will plunk into the pockets of casino operators and won’t spend on other things: meals, clothes, vacations, toys. Lawmakers should ask for a reasonable estimate of what the impact of squeezing more from Massachusetts gamblers will have on the income and sales tax figures.
The correct answer is “C”.
The FrederickClarkson.com Sweepstakes!
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No false promises. Nobody gets hurt.
That all or even most of the people who visit resort casinos are “poor”?
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Also, I find the argument that “Poor people might waste their money on this, so we should keep it illegal” completely unconvincing. Using that standard, there are hundreds of other things that are currently legal that we’d have to ban.
Well, you can argue the economics with the editors of the Boston Business Journal — which, btw, covers the gaming industry extensively. I’ll leave it to the experts to debate the degree to which this, the largest economic project in the Commonwealth since the Big Dig, will disproportionately affect the poor and working class.
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But to address your response to an argument I did not make, I don’t care what people waste their money on, regardless of class. That is not the point.
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What we have here is state-initiated gambling on a massive scale. If someone had just proposed the tobacco industry, for example, we might not choose it. As it is, we regulate and educate and pay out the wazoo for the personal and public health consequences. Casino gambling is not a choice we have to make.
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I think casino gambling is a bad choice. Candidate Patrick agreed. Now suddenly his appointees cannot say what the social impact will be, even as they promise to spend money to ameliorate it.
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I cannot think of any government-initiated economic program in the history of the Commonwealth — the core of which is based on addictive/compulsive and ultimately socially destructive behavior. We are not talking about an intended and unfortunate consequence here. We are talking about the premise of the business itself.
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The government does not iniate alchohol, tobacco or drug addictions, although we do pay for programs to ameliorate them. What the governor is proposing for the core of his economic program is based on addiction. It’s a grim idea justified with band aids. We can do better.
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I have gone to horse races and casinos, and enjoyed them, Sco. I have even known some progressional gamblers. I also know quite a bit about what happens to whole extended families who have a compulsive/addicted gambler in them.
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Whose families are we willing to sacrifice in this way? Anyone we know and care about?
That’s arguably a true statement here. It’s not true in the many states where “state stores” are the only place you can buy liquor, right? Also, as has been repeatedly discussed, the state-run and state-promoted lottery (MA’s being the largest in the country) feeds on gambling addiction to an even greater extent than casinos, since high rollers don’t play the lottery. When do we start talking about banning it?
Nay, it is.
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It seems to me that first we can stop the governor’s proposal to expand gambling addiction in the state, and then we can and should take a long hard look at the regressive tax we call the lottery and explore its negative consequences and see what, if anything, can be done. Good idea, David!
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If we aspire to restoring some sense of sanity to a nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment we would do well not to so significantly base our state’s economy on casinos and the culture of gambling. Doing so, would be as big a sucker’s game as anything in the casinos themselves.
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The impact and implications of casinos are far more than a narrow discussion of revenue streams, no matter how much certain wonks want to have it that way.
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Now how about we close those corporate tax loopholes like the governor also proposed?
Or at least make the rich play it too. If we can make the healthy purchase health insurance, why can’t we make the rich buy scratch tickets?
…The state of MA (most states apparently) run lotteries. A few states allow casino gambling, and some casino gambling goes on, on ships on the Mississippi River and on off-shore cruise ships. Does anyone know the percentage of lower-income people who actually go to casinos, in relation to the percentage who play state-run lotteries?
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I would tend to believe that the state-run lotteries attract lower-income people more than casinos, but I really have no evidence one way or another.
… but it never hurts to reiterate.
on both counts.
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It would be nice if the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil about the governors proposal to expand gambling addiction in the state would start by taking their fingers out of ears. (Of course it would be cool if they would also stop the loud LA! LA! LA! stuff too;-)
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’cause no one’s been talking about that around here.
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Seriously, this is all well and good. But I personally find it hard to take the Boston Biz Journal seriously, unless they announce their support for closing corporate loopholes and finding other ways of raising revenue. Come on guys, step up to the plate. Don’t just carp from the dugout.
It’s about time for a once-in-a-lifetime, community-wide civic engagement project that creates a space where a diverse network of civic leaders and constituencies across race lines, across traditional issue silos, and across the state can work together and learn from and with each other about taxes and all the other revenue streams that fund our local and state governments.
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It’s about time we used such a space to work together to ratify our founding parents’ vision of Massachusetts as a Commonwealth of communities fully supported and thriving.
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And then figure out how to pay for it.
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It all comes down to how we get the revenue and it’s important that we all continue to have honest, fact based conversations about where the revenue is going to come from.
All such discusion, while well meaning, would be futile until we first got a grasp on the fundamental flaws enherent in our monetary system. Could you pass the quiz? Until that issue is addressed we are all just mice on treadmills IMO
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http://www.notjustno…