Contra Casinos

There are long term as well as short term drawbacks to casino gambling as a partial cure for our state’s economic challenges. They are both serious. In the long term the link between casino gambling and the state’s economy undermines the very purpose of a commonwealth. Turning to casino gambling to answer the state’s economic needs is shifting the burden from the whole community to a handful of Pennsylvania locations. Destination-style casinos place an undue burdenon their surrounding communities that can only partially be made up by gambling revenues. Destination-style casinos will pull away dollars from other entertainment and tourist destinations. The long term drawback to shifting the economic burden from the whole to a few localities, is the furthering of a fragmentation that is already eating away at the body politic evidenced by low voter turn-out and campaigns marked by negative advertising. The deepening financial challenges of the state in the long term require the commitment of the whole commonwealth, not a casino solution. There is a complexity and cost to our economic difficulty that is not amenable to a casino fix.

For those who argue that the state’s economic predicament is a result of an appetite for more and more, casino gambling only exasperates this unfettered desire. There is an addictive quality to gambling that leads to increased tolerance so that it takes higher stakes to give the same effect of pleasure experienced previously. This hardly seems an appropriate example for and influence upon the long term fiscal health in Pennsylvania.

Gaming is not playful but is loaded with the hopes and fears of economic outcome not only for individual “players” but for many state legislators seeking this answer to much needed revenue. What is wrong with the erosion of play? When the pressure-free space of play is lost the cost to society is the absence of room for experimentation and creativity as well as learning to work together as a team. The replacement of play with non-playful pressures to win at all costs have already undermined youth sports. To some parents the game is too important to be left to the players. Because of this pressure and exaggerated emphasis on winning 70% of all youth drop out of organized sports by age of 13. Casino gambling does nothing to contribute to a playfulness that has already largely been overshadowed in our society today.

The long term effects of casino gambling are a deepening fragmentation and break-down of the common good, an increased appetite for more, and further erosion of play for play’s sake. The immediate impact aside from the economic cost to the tourist and entertainment industry in Philadelphia, the site of two casinos, is the increase in number of people who will certainly succumb to compulsive gambling. This leads to lives out of control, families hurt, and the cost to society of such criminality as embezzlement. One has to at least ask the question of the personal and social cost of trying to solve a state economic challenge with destination-style casino gambling.