Pittsburgh's "progress" towards legalized casino gambling can be presumed.
First, slot machines will come to the rescue of our state's poor suffering race tracks. That is already in the bag. The new governor is for it. He even raised campaign funds in Las Vegas without arousing public outrage. Any bets on whether the state legislature will now stand up for mere ethics⢠There's a budget deficit. That trumps all other realities.
Once thousands of slot machines cross our borders, local politicians will notice that the tax rake-off that ought to be theirs is going to the horsey hinterland. In two or three years this will prove outrageous. So casino gambling will come unless other tests are applied, including a concern for the next generation of kids who might yet be spared growing up amid a new advance in decadence.
"Gambling is a business, but it creates no wealth," wrote the historian Bernard DeVoto. "The people who gamble are transients. They have no stake in Nevada." He was writing about what was then (1955) the only gambling state, but today is the center of an industry that scatters coin slots, money wheels and green felt all over the country, especially to communities or populations (like Indian tribes) perceived in need of uplift.
Craps shooters don't provide it, observed DeVoto. "They come, spend their money and get out. A fair percentage are hoodlums attracted by all crowds and all chances for a quick buck...Their language, their behavior, their very presence make honky-tonks of the oppressively luxurious resorts whose business it is to rob the rich. And the proprietors of the honky-tonks are necessarily in a managerial alliance with the racketeers turned technically respectable businessmen...No matter how burnished a casino, there is always a reek of the underworld."
An "ordered amusement system" results, the historian pointed out, but it has "no other social importance and no economic fuction at all; it is a fungus. Its basis is the simple fact that the kind of amusement it sells is illegal elsewhere. It is politically vulnerable in the highest degree. So there has been nothing for its owners to do but become political managers."
Should it be any comfort that this common sense is decades old (though newly published in "The Western Paradox," Yale University Press, 552 pages, $18.95)⢠And that the modern "gaming" industry swears up and down it is clean, clean, clean of all mob tiesâ¢
Maybe so, but Pennsylvanians are being asked to take an awful gamble — that Nevada's slot-machine makers and casino operators won't become our own "political managers." Keep in mind how much lucrative, shady business the politicians will be able turn on or off.
What is a sure bet, because the "house" always wins, is that we will make losers of our own home-grown gamblers. At this point they have to travel to throw their money away. Local casinos would remove even that obstacle. And a disproportionate number of players are lower-income. Taking from them is, effectively, regressive taxation.
So this is snake eyes, Gov. Rendell. Let's have a real economic strategy for Pennsylvania. Something to attract "businesses that create wealth," not chase them away in moral repulsion. A pledge to raise no more campaign funds in Las Vegas might help, too.
