Finally...a little honesty about Beacon Hill

Taylor Armerding: Legislature doesn't want to look too closely at casino gambling
The Salem News

Brian Dempsey has a drill.

That's great. Haverhill's state representative is in a position to use a fiscal drill, as the new chairman of the Powerful House Ways and Means Committee (I'm making "powerful" part of the name, since that's the way everybody says it).

The problem is that he is only allowed to use it selectively.

Shortly after Gov. Deval Patrick's $30.5 billion budget for the coming fiscal year landed in the legislative chambers, Dempsey announced that he intended to "drill down" into the document, to see if the assumptions being made by the administration were valid.

That, of course, is what his boss and benefactor, House Speaker Robert DeLeo, wants him to do. And it is well worth doing. Legislators should not accept the governor's budget without some serious scrutiny.

But, based on that logic, it would also make sense for Dempsey to get his drill out to validate the utopian assumptions made by the promoters of expanded gambling in Massachusetts — resort casinos and racetrack slot parlors.

Before handing out permits for gambling palaces that will change the culture and character of the state, it would make sense to take a sober, no-spin look at whether the gauzy promises of thousands of good jobs and hundreds of millions in new money for the state, are real or would be offset by other social and economic costs.

Uh, not so much. That's not what his boss and benefactor wants him to do. DeLeo's mind is made up.

Ask the speaker a question about gambling — any question — and the answer will always be a repetitive mantra about jobs and money ... uh, "revenue."

So there was Dempsey a week or so ago, dismissing a proposal backed by state Sen. Stephen Brewer, D-Barre, who is Dempsey's Senate counterpart as its top budget writer.

That proposal would require an independent analysis of the costs and benefits of expanded gambling before the Legislature takes it up again.

No need, Dempsey said. There have already been multiple studies done.

Technically true. There have been studies. But they are in more need of a drill than Patrick's budget. They have either been paid for by gambling interests or use information supplied by gambling interests. You don't even have to read them to know what the conclusions are.

But there won't be an independent study, not because there is no need for one, but because DeLeo doesn't want one. The reason Dempsey sits where he does now is not because he's a budget genius, but because he's the speaker's go-to guy on casinos and slots.

But maybe, just maybe, the rest of the Legislature has some lingering interest in whether more gambling will really benefit the state, long-term. With the help of the state of New Hampshire and some gambling analysts, including Lawrence's Les Bernal, executive director of Stop Predatory Gambling, here are a few things Dempsey would discover, if he would only use his drill.

The New Hampshire Gambling Commission did a study on the costs and benefits of expanded gambling in our neighbor to the north. The commission concluded that a casino in New Hampshire would lead to a net loss of $68 million. That's a lot of teaching jobs.

If casinos really did make things better, the states that have them would be doing much better than we are here. But they're not. The states with the worst budget deficits, including New Jersey and Connecticut, are casino states.

Casinos themselves aren't doing all that well — gambling revenue is declining, and some of them are going bankrupt.

Casinos and slots don't create new wealth. They siphon existing wealth away from other businesses (including state lotteries) and people, most tragically from people who can least afford it — those whom Dempsey and his colleagues would be calling "the most vulnerable among us" if they were pushing another government entitlement program. Gambling takes money that people would otherwise be able to spend on food, medicine and housing.

Expanded gambling's delicately named "social costs" include poverty, debt, crime, domestic violence, other addictive behaviors involving alcohol and drugs, and suicide. Is that what the state wants to promote? Whatever happened to: "If it saves just one life, it's worth it"?

The response to much of this is the standard line that, "people are going to gamble anyway, and as long as they're going to do it, we shouldn't let Connecticut and Rhode Island reap all the benefits."

To that, Bernal notes that for 45 years, millions of people have been streaming across the border to New Hampshire, to buy retail products from computers to TVs to building materials, so they can avoid the Massachusetts sales tax. The response from our elected leaders? They raised the sales tax by 25 percent 18 months ago, increasing the incentive for business and jobs to move elsewhere.

Yet they wonder why job creation is a problem — and keep telling us gambling will solve it.

Las Vegas, in debt-ridden Nevada, glitters and shines. But it was all built by losers — literally. Gambling riches are a mirage for everybody but those running the tables.

There's our new slogan, after DeLeo and Dempsey get done bringing casinos and slots to the state: "Massachusetts: It's for losers."