Monday, July 28, 2003
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- No Dice says, "No slots!"
Thursday the Pittsburgh-based anti-gambling group invited ministers -- and a businessman who gambled away his high-tech firm in the 1980s -- to a downtown church to argue that a proposal to legalize up to 55,000 slot machines is a sucker bet.
The speakers, representing lay people as well as Lutherans, Mormons, Muslims, Presbyterians and Methodists, generally opposed gambling on moral grounds. But they said it also doesn't make economic sense, citing recent studies showing that the social costs of gambling -- from bankruptcies to crime to family strife -- can cost governments more money than the tax revenue gambling generates. "What assurances from the gambling industry [do we have] that we're not going to spend more on social costs than we're going to gain in revenue?" said community activist Richard LeGrande. "Most of the people [who gamble] lose. We have to realize this."
A University of Nevada-Las Vegas study in February found that the social cost of casino gambling in Southern Nevada was, conservatively, $300 million to $450 million a year -- about the same as the state collects from casino operators in that region. The study said the actual price could be as high as $900 million a year.
Lawmakers and Gov. Ed Rendell have said the slots revenue is needed to shore up everything from state educational funding to the state's horse racing industry itself. They argue that Pennsylvanians are already crossing state lines to gamble in Delaware and West Virginia, so the state might as well reap the benefits.
The House bill would legalize machines at nine horse racetracks plus two slots parlors, one each near Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and raise about $1 billion a year, lawmakers say. That money would come from the state's 34-percent share of machine profits.
Using that formula, for every dollar the state raises in revenue, nearly two dollars would go into the pockets of gambling interests, said No Dice president Evan Stoddard. And all the money raised, even that kept by the state, must first be lost by gamblers.
It's going to "raise the compulsive gambling rate to 5 percent of the population," Stoddard said.
The National Gambling Impact Study Commission in 1999 estimated that 7.5 million of the 125 million Americans who gamble -- or 6 percent -- do so compulsively; and that 15 million more are at risk to become problem gamblers.
Businesses at risk
Although the speakers said poorer people are more easily attracted by the "get rich quick" mentality, Ron Morris said small business owners are vulnerable, too.
Morris built a successful software firm in 1973, Information Systems Research, which he lost before he sought help for his gambling addiction about 20 years ago.
Morris said his gambling hurt far more people than himself. His 75 employees lost their jobs; his vendors lost business; and some of his customers went out of business because he did.
Stoddard said his group still hopes to stop slot-machine gambling in Pennsylvania, although some form of it appears likely because the Senate has passed a more conservative bill, allowing for 24,000 machines at eight racetracks.