Slut Wallah argues SC- if it puts its collective mind to the task- can make its coastline as trashy as Mississippi's. The crowning touch? Casinos!
Rather than subsidizing dependency, we would prefer it if our state government stopped standing in the way of jobs for its struggling citizens – whether in the form of public-private port facilities, casino resorts or any other example of the private sector attempting to do its job.
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Last March, this website endorsed expanding casino gambling along the South Carolina coast based on the belief that it would dramatically enhance the competitiveness of our state’s tourism industry – without relying on government-run scams like the infamous “Coastal Kickback” to do it.
We still feel that way … and we believe that every year in which state lawmakers fail to take up this issue is another year that they neglect to seize a rare competitive advantage.
Anyway, we indicated at the time that we would consider extending our support beyond casino gambling on the coast based on “whether we believe other expanded gambling proposals provide clear benefits to South Carolina taxpayers – and by extension our state’s economy.”
Make no mistake, our strong bias in almost every case will be to strongly support such enterprises.
Why? Because we believe in the primacy of the free market.
But what kind of jobs, how many, and with what multiplier effect? Temporary, few, and little:
Rather than subsidizing dependency, we would prefer it if our state government stopped standing in the way of jobs for its struggling citizens – whether in the form of public-private port facilities, casino resorts or any other example of the private sector attempting to do its job.
________
Last March, this website endorsed expanding casino gambling along the South Carolina coast based on the belief that it would dramatically enhance the competitiveness of our state’s tourism industry – without relying on government-run scams like the infamous “Coastal Kickback” to do it.
We still feel that way … and we believe that every year in which state lawmakers fail to take up this issue is another year that they neglect to seize a rare competitive advantage.
Anyway, we indicated at the time that we would consider extending our support beyond casino gambling on the coast based on “whether we believe other expanded gambling proposals provide clear benefits to South Carolina taxpayers – and by extension our state’s economy.”
Make no mistake, our strong bias in almost every case will be to strongly support such enterprises.
Why? Because we believe in the primacy of the free market.
But what kind of jobs, how many, and with what multiplier effect? Temporary, few, and little:
When it comes to the real economy, legal gambling has the same limitation as Wall Street speculation: It doesn’t make tangible things that we need or foster broad-based prosperity.
In fact, the gaming economy may be reaching its outer limits, as new casinos cannibalize revenue from preexisting operations. In Atlantic City, casinos have experienced a $1.6 billion decline in revenue and hemorrhaged more than 96,000 jobs since Pennsylvania opened its first casino in 2006. The depressed business reduces the tax revenue generated for desperate state coffers and prompt government to take ever more desperate measures. The $2.4 billion Revel, Atlantic City’s newest resort and casino slated to open in May, was only completed after Gov. Chris Christie delivered a $261 million tax credit to the project.
The American Gaming Association, says Fahrenkopf, does not get involved in statehouse debates because they so often pit his members against one another.
In states that legalize gambling, casinos no doubt create jobs but they don’t necessarily stimulate the larger economy. A 1999 report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission found that “few businesses can be found more than a few blocks from the Atlantic City boardwalk. Many of the ‘local’ businesses remaining are pawnshops, cash-for-gold stores and discount outlets. One witness noted that, ‘in 1978 [the year the first casino opened], there were 311 taverns and restaurants in Atlantic City. Nineteen years later, only 66 remained, despite the promise that gaming would be good for the city’s own.’”
The destruction of Main Street America in the age of Wal-Mart cannot, of course, be blamed entirely on casinos.
“You always get that sort of thing, and it’s not only in this industry,” says [American Gaming Association CEO and former Republican National Committee chair Frank] Fahrenkopf. “When a new mall is coming into a community, it’s going to have chain shoe stores, chain restaurants. The small town businesses are going to face the same — I don’t know if you want to call it capitalism — the same free market challenge.”
Casino jobs are comparable to those created throughout the American service economy: They are no replacement for vanished manufacturing employment, and wages can be quite low if unions don’t fight their way into the picture. In Las Vegas, Culinary Workers Local 226 (part of UNITE HERE) has organized 60,000 casino and hospitality workers, boosting wages and benefits far above those that prevail in non-union Reno. But Atlantic City’s downward spiral shows the fragility of labor success in the service economy. Most of the 5,500 permanent employees at the Revel will, in a first for the heavily unionized boardwalk, have to reapply for their jobs every four to six years.
Likewise, the prospect of casinos driving net job growth nationwide seems unlikely. While commercial casino revenues nationwide have increased by 73 percent since 1998, employment grew by just 5 percent, or 15,132 jobs, to 340,564. In New England, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island are rushing to expand casino gambling and outcompete their neighbors. But as casinos expand, new profits are by-and-large net transfers to casino magnates who, flush with cash, leverage political muscle at the statehouse. In New York, Malaysian billionaire KT Lim, chairman of gambling empire Genting Berhad, has poured a large but undisclosed sum into a high-end lobbying operation to expand gambling in New York with the goal of remaking the “racino” at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens into a multibillion-dollar casino resort and conference center.
In Florida, legislation to legalize casinos was last month defeated in large part because of Disney World’s behemoth opposition: Their lucrative version of tourism is based on a “family friendly” brand. The political viability of casino gambling may be determined less by popular will and more by the balance of power between moneyed interests in any given state. In New York, major business groups like the Partnership for New York City, the Committee to Save New York, the Business Council of New York State — and, now, decisively and after long-running opposition, magnate Mayor Michael Bloomberg — support the legislation. Meanwhile, racetrack owners in New York and other states are scrambling to obtain a monopoly on expanded gambling.
The expansion of casino gambling can engender fierce opposition. And it can make for strange political bedfellows too, as progressive social justice advocates and Christian anti-gambling moralists join forces. In Philadelphia, activists organized a diverse, if ultimately unsuccessful, citywide movement against SugarHouse. But other neighbors welcome the casino and the largess they deliver via “community benefit agreements” through which casinos pay for school books, libraries and programs for senior citizens and veterans. Functions that in the past were expected from government are now delivered by corporations under a halo of philanthropic beneficence.
The limits of casino capitalism are nowhere more evident than in the birthplace of legal gambling in America: Las Vegas. Wall Street investment fueled the rise of modern Las Vegas casinos. In the 1980s, Steve Wynn was the first casino magnate to fund the construction of a new casino through Wall Street-issued junk bonds, displacing the mafia as legalized gambling’s patron of first resort. Wall Street also funded Las Vegas’ meteoric housing boom, which has ended in one of the country’s largest busts: housing prices in the city more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. When the bubble burst, Las Vegas spent 22 months as the nation’s foreclosure capital.
And so casino capitalism spreads relentlessly even after Las Vegas, the brightly lit neon dream of a post-industrial America, has come crashing down.
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