Posted on 09/09/2014 7:20:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
For those who promote legalized gambling as a means of economic development or revitalization, or as a painless way to pay for public schools, the recent news from Atlantic City, New Jersey, is sobering.
Dominated by its famous boardwalk, the beach resort is familiar to Americans from the popular game of Monopoly, the Miss America pageant and the Democratic Convention that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson for president. Almost 40 years ago, when casino gambling was prohibited by every state except Nevada, New Jersey voters succumbed to a slick campaign that promised to remake the fading resort into Las Vegas East.
For awhile it seemed to work, as people from all over the Northeast rode buses to Atlantic City to sit for hours in front of mesmerizing slot machines. But casino revenues have fallen steadily to where they were 25 years ago, and this year four of Atlantic City's 11 casinos closed their doors, with a fifth expected to follow soon.
The closed casinos have eliminated 8,000 jobs in a city whose unemployment rate was already twice the national average, and the assessed value of the unoccupied properties will have to be sharply reduced. And no property was bigger or fell harder than the gargantuan Revel Casino Hotel, which was custom designed for high rollers who never showed up.
What can be done with a 57-story, hermetically sealed glass building with 1,400 hotel rooms and 10 swimming pools occupying 20 acres on the boardwalk? When it filed for bankruptcy a second time last month, the owners declared the value of the property was worth less than 20 percent of what it cost, telling the bankruptcy judge that the casino is "a melting ice cube."
The $2.4 billion it cost to construct that now-useless "glass elephant" was greater than the taxes New Jersey collected from all the other casinos in the past eight years. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had the chance to pull the plug on the project four years ago, but instead he doubled down, committing $261 million of state funds to see it through to completion.
Atlantic City parallels what happened in Alton, Illinois, where my husband and I lived for 44 years raising our six children. A riverboat casino was touted as the new "services" economy to replace the manufacturing plants that once supported over 10,000 families there.
After the politically connected original investors cashed in their chips a decade ago, Alton's casino steadily declined to about half of its original revenue. Along the way, a local family-owned business was devastated when a trusted employee embezzled over $100,000 to support her gambling losses "on the boat," as people still say although the so-called boat never leaves the dock anymore.
While Christie was bailing out the soon-to-collapse Revel Casino, he also committed New Jersey to enter the untested field of Internet gambling, which enables people to lose their life's savings in one fit of depression, without even leaving their office or home. Internet betting preys on the compulsive gambler because it invites him to feed his habit in secret, without criticism by family or friends.
Gambling over the Internet was deemed illegal based on a 1961 law called the Wire Act. As recently as 2007, the FBI was warning Americans that it is against the law to gamble over the Internet, and the operators of online virtual casinos were prosecuted.
But in another example of the Obama administration changing a law without congressional approval, its Department of Justice surprisingly announced just before Christmas 2011 that many forms of Internet gambling are legal after all. Obama's DOJ declared that the Wire Act prohibited sports betting, but implied that other forms of gambling (such as online poker) may not be considered illegal under the Wire Act.
At that time -- nearly three years ago -- the size of online gambling was estimated to be already immense, between $6 billion to $100 billion a year. Chris Christie obviously salivated at the prospect of collecting a share of that money for New Jersey, projecting $180 million the first year -- almost as much as the state now takes in from casinos.
But the state's actual revenue from Internet gambling this year was only a little over $9 million, which is 95 percent less than Christie expected. Meanwhile, more conservative states (such as Texas) have held the line against gambling expansions.
The lesson of New Jersey should not be lost on Republicans who are vetting potential presidential candidates for 2016. Some of the Republican "donor class" may be considering Chris Christie, who is not a conservative, as someone who could control the federal budget after eight years of Obama's deficit spending.
Like the liberal Republicans who are currently running for governor of two other blue states, California and Illinois, Christie offers himself as a non-ideological pragmatist who can manage the state's finances. The catastrophe of Christie's bad bet on gambling, both virtual and bricks-and-mortar, proves yet again that there simply is no such thing as a viable "social liberal, fiscal conservative."
I believe the mistake many make is that they keep on playing when they win something instead of stopping and take the money and run
I’ll call and raise
My nominee for the stupidest government to pursue gambling has to be Mississippi. The state had a beautiful little stretch of pristine Gulf Coast, but when the powers that be decided that they needed casinos, they required them to be floating, like casinos on riverboats. The casinos bought up prime Gulf Coast beachfront, floated the actual gambling part of the hotel/casino complex, and ruined the beach in the process.
They should have required the boats to actually move up and down the river while gambling took place
Politicians got campaign funds walking around money. Union bosses got payoffs. Construction companies, law firms, materials suppliers - the entire Democrat funding apparatus was well rewarded by supporting this project.
The author is using the wrong metric. The casino was a huge success, from the perspective of everyone except a taxpayer. :)
I’m curious as to the tribe which is big on education. I believe the state-of-the-art diabetes clinic is run by the Navajo Nation, right?
Gamblers are very narcissistic and while usually bright, given to magical thinking that borders on the delusional. No, not easy to treat successfully.
My whole view of gambling is that it’s extreme speculation. People speculate all the time, or try to give themselves a best projection of a possible outcome. Gambling appears to be a case of speculation taken to an extreme extent. Crossing lines within a normal desire seems tough not to do once you have done it.
The perpetrators even went so far as to change the name, from "gambling" to "gaming," which they seem to think is more benign. IDK how much difference that has made, but if you hear someone talk about "gaming" you know he is not neutral, but a shill for the industry. Take what he says accordingly.
Delaware state government recently did a bailout of their casinos. I wonder how dependent the NASCAR stadium was on casinos. But it appears to be enormous.
Maybe casinos failed because it was in NEW JERSEY! The armpit of the nation!
Like I say, magical thinking. There may well be stock speculators with these characteristics, but they don't last long.
When they happen to be together, gamblers call themselves and each other "degenerates" and the cliche even they repeat is "gamblers die broke."
Truthfully, I’ve not heard of the education tribe before or since. But it is the Pima Indians that have horrific problems with diabetes.
The Pima are an odd bunch. Often black in skin tone, but a purplish black, not a brownish black like Negroes. The theory is that after centuries of living in near starvation conditions, their livers became extremely efficient, to the point where a hard working adult Pima could comfortably survive on 600-800 calories a day. (Hard working White Americans need over 2000 for adult women and 2800 for adult men.)
But there’s more. One of the main staples of the Pima diet was flour from ground mesquite bean pods. It is very low on the glycemic index, so diabetes was unheard of in the Indians of the time.
Yet you feed a Pima Indian a white style diet and they will balloon up.
BTW, my opinion on gambling is that it is a lot like drugs or alcohol: it’s a diversion or entertainment when used occasionally in small doses, and most people can take it or leave it, but some people will become addicted to it. OK, maybe you can’t really be “addicted” to gambling by the strict meaning of the word, but clearly some people have great trouble controlling themselves when it comes to gambling. And they will do things to keep getting their fix that they never would have done otherwise.
That’s not to say that I would prefer gambling was re-criminalized, but I do find it ironic that the same governments that are forever trying to protect us from ourselves by stamping out smoking, discouraging drinking, prohibiting drugs, passing seatbelt and helmet laws, etc, seem to be doing everything it can to promote gambling, despite knowing the destruction it causes in some people’s lives. I see little difference between a drug addict and a gambling addict, in terms of the harm done to themselves, and the harm they cause their families, friends and communities. Well, except that I’ve never heard of anyone embezzling a quarter million dollars to support their drug habit.
It was a very tough life back then. Some of my Ute relatives used to war with the Navajo way back when. Both were damn proud of the fact that the Spanish never succeeded in enslaving them.
They had that in common with the Pima and Pueblo, though some in the Pueblo group did eventually surrender to the Spanish and come into the Missions. These ancient wars come with deep regret even to this modern day because we really didn't hate each other. We were just trying to survive the Spanish, Comanche and other more aggressive groups that wouldn't just leave us alone.
Some say we always lived in what is now the American Southwest. Some say we may have moved there to escape the deprivations of the Aztec further south. Probably some of both. My Navajo friend claims dependency from the Anasazi which, as you probably know, predate the Aztec by at least a millennium.
Sorry.
Now, we're well on our way to slots on every street corner. A Senior can get on a bus for $1 and be left off at the casino. The money they spend there isn't being spent on the family, at local businesses, to improve their houses. And towns depend on local income taxes for budgets. I'd think the casinos are putting more money with the state and less with the communities, that are already suffering.
How do you treat a person with a gambling problem if the casino is a $1 bus ride away?
Yes Indiana was making a killing with casinos because we were in early. Now everybody in the Great Lakes has them and the take has plunged. I can see a few Atlantic City style bankruptcies coming.
Interesting. Had a bf who was an addictions counselor, having cleaned up alcohol and drug probs of his own decades ago. But at the casino, he was an idiot. I actually made money there, and so did he, but his went back into the machines while mine went into my pocket. I couldn't drag him away.
He liked to gamble; I liked to win. Big difference. No way I could get him to stop loosing…maybe loosing is an addiction, which raises lots of psychopossibilities.
No, I haven't been back to the casinos since we stopped seeing each other.
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