State's Casinos: Lean Days For Golden Geese?

When a business model is based on the shakey foundation of exploiting 10% of patrons to produce 90% of profits, designed to create addiction, filled with myths, it is destined to impoverish us all and fail.

CASINO DEFAULT • This state revenue stream was never meant to be permanent

Foxwoods Resort Casino's warning that it couldn't make a full interest payment due last week on a $500 million note was a cold-water shower for those who think Connecticut can always count on gaming to pour a stream of money into the state treasury.

It's hard to imagine Foxwoods, with its impressive resort campus, unable to make a full debt payment on schedule, so huge has the American Indian gaming and entertainment enterprise in southeastern Connecticut become in the past decade and a half.

But the gaming industry nationwide is showing recession-related stress: A number of casinos have defaulted on debt or gone into bankruptcy. The decline last month of slot machine revenue at Foxwoods and nearby Mohegan Sun is symptomatic of industry troubles as Americans react to the recession by cutting back on such pastimes as casinos.

The decline in casino slot revenue has implications for the state budget, of course, because the state gets a percentage of the take above a base amount. This is like bonus money: It should not be regarded as dependable, always-increasing income.

Further stress on Connecticut's casinos — and the state's treasury — will occur if casinos open in next-door Massachusetts.

This is the Gambling Arms Race.

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Doubt about future gaming revenue is one more reason to curtail state government spending.
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And from Gladys --

Now wait just one minute...

Doesn't Connecticut host two of the World's largest casinos? And isn't that

where all of our State's gambling dollars - the one's we're supposed to re-

capture with expanding gambling - are supposedly ending up? So ok,

maybe Senator Rosenberg can explain how the State of Connecticut could

possibly be in such a hole with all that money that that they'd actually

consider legalizing 24/7 drinking at two of the world's largest casinos?

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And does that mean Massachusetts would go down that road too?

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And where, exactly, does that road end?

--"Six Degrees of Suffolk Downs"