Somerville Voices

The mayor of Somerville, Joseph Curtatone, has courageously and accurately called casino revenues “fool’s gold,” while other mayors, such as Michael Bissonnette of Chicopee, are shilling for the casino industry—along with Governor Patrick and Senate President Therese Murray. The reality for Somervillians is that bringing a casino into the Greater Boston area will cost them money, eventually quite a bit of money.

Massachusetts is the target of a massive industry-led effort to place three “destination” casinos around the state and a competing effort, by the corrupt leadership of the Wampanoag tribe, fronting for yet other developers, to open one that is nominally under their control.

They are all hoping to fool you with their promises of gold for the picking. Here are some of the myths and misrepresentations they are trying to trick you with.

• A major benefit of casinos will be the creation of new jobs. As the Boston Globe of March 2, 2008, reports, Governor Patrick’s estimate of 30,000 new construction jobs was a shuck and a jive. Well under half that number, and possibly only a fifth, are likely to appear, and then only for two or three years. But that’s not the real problem with talking about “new jobs” as a measure of economic development or benefit from casinos. New jobs, in and of themselves, say nothing about economic development (and this is a mistake that Mayor Curtatone has made in other contexts). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, created new jobs, many of them in the construction and airport security industries. The nasty potholes of this winter will create some new jobs for asphalt workers. Heroin and cocaine create jobs (undertakers, police, counselors, builders of prisons and treatment facilities). You get the picture. None of these jobs represents an economic benefit, except to the people who happen to hold them. Overall, they take the wealth out of the Commonwealth.

• Casinos will improve local economies. This is unlikely. Mostly, casinos will “cannibalize” jobs from local businesses offering lodging, food, or other forms of entertainment. Whether there will be a net improvement of wages and benefits, as claimed, appears unlikely. Property values near casinos are likely to go down, as casino neighborhoods become undesirable for residences and other types of business.

• Never mind jobs, overall the casinos will promote development in the Commonwealth. Show me where else that has happened. In Atlantic City, which has had casinos for three decades, one-quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Have you noticed that Nevada’s streets are not, in fact, paved with gold? Assessments of quality of life in communities with casinos have been inconclusive, but nowhere has a large majority of residents seen casinos as an undiluted blessing.

• But economic predictions are based on the expectation that these casinos will be “destinations,” offering tourists the opportunity to savor Massachusetts scenery and culture, as well as top-notch entertainment. Las Vegas is a destination because it has a concentration of casinos, just as Davis Square is a destination for diners because it has a concentration of good restaurants. People who are drawn to a place because they can gamble there want (a) to gamble, (b) to drink, (c) to find prostitutes, and (d) maybe take in a show with exposed flesh or a comedian who has come out of retirement. Las Vegas does this well. Atlantic City isn’t bad at it. Massachusetts is unlikely to come in even a distant third. And the more casinos there are in New England, the harder it will be for any of them to take business away from the others. Massachusetts casinos may cut into the take of Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, but the reverse is also true.

• Casinos will bring a billion dollars into the state’s coffers and support state services. Only if you listen to economists on the payroll of the casino industry, or the governor, who presumably is not yet on their payroll. The governor’s plan, which puts casino revenue on this year’s budget, is speculative. A private company that plans to enter a risky business and claims the future estimate of profits on this year’s balance sheet is committing fraud. The casino plan is gambling on the state’s future and denying the nature of the risk. Responsible, independent estimates are that casinos will eventually cost about three times what they bring in because of the damage they will do. This damage, however, is much harder to measure than casino tax payments, and it is easily kept off the books. It ranges from local policing costs (more alcohol-related crimes, traffic violations, prostitution) to embezzlement (problem gamblers trying to cover their losses) to defaults on debts, child support, and work days. Little by little, public expenditure goes up to deal with these costs, until tax money must be diverted to support the casino industry. As of 2003, one estimate was that each person in an economy with readily available casino gambling paid about $150 a year, simply as a result of having casino gambling as part of that economy.

• Pathological gamblers are limited in number and present a relatively small and contained problem. Pathological gamblers aren’t born sweating and looking for an opportunity to gamble on the sly. They are created, primarily by lotteries and slot machines in 21st-century America. One estimate of the prevalence of problem and pathological gamblers, twenty years after the surge in casino openings, sets the figure at over 3 percent of the adult population. It is virtually a law of nature: gambling addicts will be created by casinos. The closer a casino is located to a population, the higher its percentage of gambling addicts. Within about fifty miles of a casino over three in every hundred people develops some level of addiction. This fact is essential to the success of casinos. Most of their income is generated by people living within fifty miles, and 30 percent of their income is generated by gambling addicts. No addicts, no profits. A casino will never be located in Somerville, but the governor’s plan will put one close enough to cost Somerville a lot of money and sorrow.

• The “suckers” are the only ones who suffer. Each gambling addict causes economic or health damage to people around him or her. By one estimate, about a dozen people in the gambler’s circle will suffer. A recent Canadian study reported that two-thirds of problem gamblers engaged in some kind of violence with their intimate partners; one-quarter of the subjects had inflicted severe injuries.

• Addicted gamblers will be cured with money set aside for them. No treatment for pathological gambling has been proven to achieve sustained remission. Even in the short term, results of treatment trials have tended to be ambiguous or negative. As nearly as I can tell, the most promising treatments involve experimental drugs that will be hugely expensive if and when they pan out and are approved.

• The right to gamble is a civil liberty, so casinos should be licensed for this reason alone. The libertarian argument is often advanced by self-styled progressives. Their reasoning is bonkers. Gambling is totally legal in Massachusetts. You and I can play poker in the kitchen or sit together on a park bench and bet which pigeon will poop first. What has been illegal is industrialized gambling of the sort that casinos will bring. The proposal to license three, and only three, casinos is not an expression of laissez-faire economics and libertarianism, which would permit slot machines wherever someone could fit them in: in convenience stores, bars, theaters, bus stations, and airports. (Whoops. The Lottery is already doing that.) No, this is a move by the state to grant monopolies to giant developers who will make huge amounts of money, unless they can’t, and then they’ll leave, and their casinos will become the same tawdry affairs as many of the casinos elsewhere in the country.

• Casinos are part of an American tradition, like apple pie. The governor made this argument when he first pitched casinos, pointing out that lotteries were common in the Colonial era and afterward. Not really. He needs a history lesson. Lotteries served two purposes in the Colonies and the early United States. Some lotteries, such as the ones that built Harvard dormitories, were simply a way to promote charitable contributions, just like today. But lotteries also existed because there was little accumulation of capital and there were essentially no banks. You couldn’t get an acceptable price for a big item such as a house, for example, because few potential buyers had the cash reserves to pay and they could not get the necessary loans. But if a seller could put together a lottery and entice enough people to buy tickets, he or she would get something like the asking price and the losers, ostensibly, didn’t lose that much. Puritan ministers didn’t think much of the arrangement, but they winked at it because it seemed practical. In the early years of the country, commercial gambling began to proliferate, but not long into the nineteenth century the states began to outlaw it because of the breathtaking corruption that developed. Nevada was the exception (to the prohibition, not the corruption). Lotteries were not restarted in this country until 1964, when New Hampshire began its state lottery so as to protect its wealthier citizens from the dreary obligation to pay for state services (taxes). After that, lotteries became contagious, as the right-wing anti-tax movement acquired more clout. A dozen years later, New Jersey legalized casinos in the hope of drawing in Easterners who didn’t feel like flying to Las Vegas. A few years after that, Congress authorized Indian casinos, and the slippery slope had been thoroughly greased. Casinos and lotteries have metastasized throughout the country, but not because they are an American tradition. State lotteries are little more than forty years old. The spread of casinos has occurred in the past twenty-odd years.

• Riverboats and Rhett Butler are the model of the modern casino and gambler. No. Riverboats were venues for gambling in the nineteenth century (because they slipped away from state regulation). But it was table gambling such as poker, blackjack, roulette, or baccarat that they offered. Slot machines were a feature of carnivals, where they might dispense prizes, not money. Table games were seen as a man’s type of gambling. Slot machines were for the ladies. But it turns out that slot machines can be a tremendously compelling form of gambling, especially if they cough up a few coins from time to time. Casino operators learned this and incorporated them into their business plans. Now slot machines provide 90 percent of the revenue of casinos. Table games are there basically for appearance and atmosphere. Currently, casinos hire computer programmers and psychologists to engineer the schedule of payoffs from slot machines to make them even more addictive than they were when you had to pull a lever and the yield was regulated by mechanical gears.

• “Together we can.” Candidate Patrick’s slogan implied that we would all work together to make Massachusetts a better place to live. But it turns out that his plan is to finance Massachusetts by shifting the cost of government to gambling addicts (if you do the math). Of course, The Lottery is already doing this, in spades. But Deval Patrick appears to have fallen victim to the propaganda of his college classmate, Grover Norquist, who persuaded politicians all over America that taxes are a third rail, even if higher taxes lead to a lowered cost of living and a better quality of life.

• The governor is playing this issue with a full and unmarked deck. I can sell you a nice bridge to get you across the Mystic River.