In Search Of A Free Lunch
By Greg L | 12 February 2007 | Virginia Politics | 2 Comments
Nothing is more expensive than “free money”.
Mason Conservative writes about the likely success of a bill in the General Assembly which would allow “instant” horse racing machines, which is pretty much a video slot machine that uses archive footage of past horse races for a thin cover of respectability. The predictable argument in favor of this is that it will generate a lot of tax revenue which would be useful in dealing with whatever the financial crisis of the month happens to be. How convenient. We have always seem to have one budget crisis or another, and the gambling industry just happens to have a solution every time.
Readers following the Rack & Roll scandal have a little taste of what “free money” like this actually costs. Expanding gambling, which preys on humanity’s consistent delusion that they’re likely to walk out of a gambling facility with more money than they walked in with, creates huge local economic dislocations as huge piles of cash start showing up, or promise to. In Manassas Park, secret land deals and redevelopment projects pretty clearly have corrupted significant portions of the city government and resulted in some utterly horrid treatment of at least one local business owner who became somewhat inconvenient. But legitimate concerns based on our past experiences with even unsuccessful attempts to expand gambling are brushed aside because “it is a big pool of money that has been left untapped”.
Continuing to prohibit prostitution also leaves a “big pool of money untapped.” Want to solve the transportation funding problem? Let’s fill each neigborhood with brothels and make sure the state takes it cut, and we’ll have all the money we’ll ever want, I’m sure.
This “instant gaming” scheme is nothing but slots with a horse racing theme, and generating God knows how much revenue from these will undobtably impoverish many and enrich a very few who will use that money to pursue expansion of their profitable business like any other businessowner would. The direct impacts on the many certain victims of this scheme and the ends to which the profits this will generate will be devoted will cost us far more than the tax revenues it generates will provide.
TANSTAAFL.
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Well, gawrsh, does that mean we should not become the Nevada of the East? We could rename “Richmond” to “Virginia City” even!
What we really need, and I’m for these machines right now, is for Republicans to go back to being Republicans. And Virignia needs to start electing Republican governors. The biggest crime in ALL of these is how Kaine and Warner get to go around talking about a “fiscal crisis” when spending has increased under their watch by close to 40%! But nobody is willing, at least in the MSM, to talk about that.