More false promises

Between misguided lawmakers seeking easy solutions and a predatory industry promising Fools' Gold, this states the obvious ---

Casinos are self-contained. They do not generate broad-based economic activity in the surrounding community. Table games will ensure that the casinos expand their own amenities that compete with existing businesses.


An easy solution may have hard consequences

Gov. Ed Rendell has asserted through most of his tenure that the state government would not authorize the expansion of casino gambling until he leaves office - nearly up to the day last week when he signed a deeply flawed law authorizing table games at existing casinos.

Like debt-ridden gamblers, lawmakers and the governor themselves were desperately in need of new revenue when they decided to vastly expand gambling. They expect license fees and taxes to generate about $370 million in state income over two years. At the same time it will funnel a cut of new vigorish to some worthy enterprises, including $600,000 a year to the Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton.

No consideration of heavy costs

But the costs likely will be greater if not as obvious.

Casinos are self-contained. They do not generate broad-based economic activity in the surrounding community. Table games will ensure that the casinos expand their own amenities that compete with existing businesses.

The law perversely skews even a rational vision for the state government's role in education and economic development. State Rep. Todd Eachus was virtually giddy, for example, that community colleges will establish training for croupiers and dealers. Is that the employment base that will carry the state forward, as the state government reduces funding to universities?

And this bill was written for the casino industry rather than for Pennsylvanians.

In their rush to fill a hole in the state budget, lawmakers did not rush even to correct gaping flaws in the original bill that created the gambling industry five years ago.

The law does not resolve law enforcement issues that have plagued the licensing and enforcement process since the outset.

It allows casinos to issue on-the-spot lines of credit to would-be gamblers who are short on cash or other forms of credit, promising an exponential increase in gambling addiction and the social dysfunction that goes with it.

So pervasive is the legislative kow-tow to the industry that it even allows two developing casinos in Philadelphia to skirt that city's anti-smoking law.

Path of least resistance

Rep. Mark Cohen of Philadelphia put it well when he said that adding table games is the "worst way to raise revenues other than the other worst ways."

That doesn't account for the good ways to raise revenue. No one expected Pennsylvania lawmakers to correct the state's budget problems through anything other than the easiest possible means.

There was little chance that they would close a state revenue loophole that enables corporations to skirt more than $300 million a year in tax payments by attributing income to operations in other states.

They deliberately did not impose a reasonable "severance" tax on natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale gas fields.

And they continued to hoard their own operating surplus of about $200 million, rather than returning it to the taxpayers, as the government has cut services and jobs. At the same time, they refused to move toward a smaller state Legislature, which would mitigate the need for revenue.

Lawmakers who have found an easy answer in gambling expansion promote a vision for Pennsylvania that is as illusory as the promise of gambling itself.