All told, legal gambling in the United States generates roughly $ 40 billion in annual net revenues, from maybe $ 500 billion worth of wagers. It is now the nation’s fastest growing “entertainment.” American casino attendance almost tripled between 1990 and 1994, to 125 million. And so, no surprise, gambling has quickly become a political issue. A series of legally murky, previously submerged, but very high-stakes conflicts currently pits state treasuries, gambling corporations, Indian tribes, and Democrats and Republicans against one another — in complicated, shifting, sometimes surprising alliances all across the country.
How exciting. And yet, at the same time, how bathed in deadening euphemism Washington’s gambling debate has been so far.
Gambling promoters — sorry, “gaming industry representatives” — resent this new attention to what they insist is a free-enterprise phenomenon. People gamble of their own volition; no one forces them to. It is fun. And this private pursuit of pleasure brings socially beneficial results. The economy grows. That growth rescues once-depressed towns and cities. And the new tax revenues gambling produces, so often “earmarked” for things like education, fuel unimpeachable public missions with irreplaceable public dollars. It says so right here, in research conducted at the University of Nevada’s Las Vegas and Reno campuses. Wink, wink.
Or maybe not. Here’s what the doubters say: New gambling joints actually attract a limited local pool of customers. These businesses “grow” nothing, but instead suck a region’s fixed entertainment budget away from existing movie theaters and restaurants and into the coffers of parasitic casino companies. Add to this equation the public improvements necessary to sustain new gambling development, and the increased costs of crime control and other social services, and the whole thing nets out. At best.
Notice what’s missing from this argument? It is all so excruciatingiy polite. The conversation is about dry “policy” — about whether gambling ” works” for the purposes around which post-New Deal American government is organized. Robert Goodman, author of the anti-gambling movement’s current bible of wonkery, The Luck Business, says what animates him is worry over whether gambling is a genuinely effective tool for economic renewal. Why, he asks, “are governments so willing to enter into profit-sharing partnerships with gambling companies, but so averse to making similar arrangements with other, potentially more productive industries?” The gambling craze, he concludes, is of a piece with the sorry general social trend toward empty speculation, like investments in “uninsured mutual funds” and — no kidding — the interest of small boys in trading baseball cards.
What Goodman is not so worried about, he writes explicitly, is gambling as a matter of public and private morality. Similarly, Republican Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, lead House sponsor of a proposed congressional “gambling commission,” denies that he and his allies have “moral musings.” Democrat Paul Simon, chief sponsor of a companion Senate measure (and a career4ong critic of gaming interests), says the question of gambling “should not be a moral one, rather it should be a practical one.” The Washington Post, which supports the commission’s creation, is quick to identify its concerns ” not with the morality of gambling as such,” but only with its practical ” impact.”
Come now: We can do better than that. Some gambling enterprises are successful. Others fail. But on the bottom line, gambling is now a fabulously profitable commerce. Unless you are a socio-industrial policy fetishist, you cannot argue that gambling’s “costs” out-weigh its benefits.
Except in one unquantifiable respect. Frequent gambling is what used to be known as — pardon the expression — a vice.
Gambling, not to put too fine a point on it, is addictive. It is already a ” problem” habit for somewhere between 1.5 percent and 6.5 percent of the adult American population. Those figures can only get larger The gambling industry employs an arsenal of behavioral psychologists, demographers, and marketers to devise ever more ingenious inducements for more people to play, and play more and more often. Games like poker and blackjack, which take some time and reward at least a bit of skill and knowledge, are increasingly rare. The typical modern gambling experience involves a keno or slot or video lottery machine, which — with its metronomic, mathematically predetermined payoff thrills — encourages its customer to sit and stare until his money is gone.
Now, it is one thing for a government to tolerate such behavior, and stand idly by while some small but tragic percentage of its citizens destroy themselves in its grip. It is quite another for that government to encourage and participate in such behavior directly, to serve as croupier. That is to grant gambling the status of an approved public good — of an ideal. It doesn’t deserve that status, to put it mildly.
Tocqueville warned that in a society like ours, which prizes free and open competition and embodies the possibility of rapid changes in wealth and position, men naturally come to “think in terms of sudden and easy fortunes, of great possessions easily won and lost, and chance in every shape and form.” To combat such dangerous thinking, he said, government should strive to ” give daily practical examples to the citizens proving that wealth, renown, and power are the reward of work, that great success comes when it has been long desired, and that nothing of lasting value is achieved without trouble.”
Roll over, Alexis. “Hey, you never know!” shout commercials for the New York State Lottery. Life is an arbitrary game, and wagers win the top prize. The chance of that actually happening? Ssshh: one in 13 million. New York dupes its residents out of more than $1 billion each year this way. And they hardly have to move to get taken. Quick Draw, the state’s keno scam, holds a new game every five minutes — each televised simultaneously to 2,500 locations from the Canadian border to Staten Island. Thus does the government now actively corrupt its citizens — knowing full well that it is the poorest among them, those least immune to the lure and the damage, who are most often suckered by the pitch.
No, the occasional bingo session or twice-a-year trip to Atlantic City will not grow hair on your palms. For that reason alone, the national abolition of gambling is an infeasible, and unreasonable, goal. Indian tribal casinos, which represent so much of gambling’s recent explosive growth, are the product of abstruse constitutional questions. They are tied up both in the courts and in the nation’s guilty conscience about the desolation of Indian reservations. They will not go away any time soon.
Nor will the non-Indian casinos that have blossomed since the early 1990s disappear in one fell swoop. Their legality and regulation are traditionally (and properly) the province of state and local authorities. And while there is no groundswell for the expansion of this branch of the gambling industry — state-wide referenda on such questions are usually defeated-neither is there a popular movement suffcient to repeal it anywhere it exists. Too many Americans have cycled “harmlessly” through too many gambling establishments for that. The notion that privately owned gambling constitutes a grave and immediate threat to society hasn’t yet taken hold, and may never do so.
But lotteries are another story. New York, 35 other states, and the District of Columbia now rely on these cynical, socially corrosive forms of regressive taxation for revenue they would be unable to acquire otherwise. Most lotteries actually predate the private and Indian casinos that now capture so much public attention. This kind of state-managed gambling, at very least, is irreducibly a matter of both private and public morality, especially when it is advertised so relentlessly. And it is already way, way out of control.
The new anti-gambling caucus in Washington is a welcome development, if only for the useful debate it might inspire. But that debate is needlessly weakened by the resort to peripheral arguments apparently adopted in an attempt to dodge accusations of finger-wagging Puritanism. In this case, properly targeted, a little Puritanism wouldn’t be so bad. Aim for gambling’s worst, unarguable sin. State-run lotteries are state-sponsored vice.
David Tell, for the Editors
