Stop Predatory Gambling

“The smell of desperation on slot machines permeates our political class”

by Les

Responding to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s drive for a Chicago casino, journalist James Warren writes one of the best op-ed pieces we have read in some time about the failed policy of predatory gambling. It is a must-read. Here are my favorite excerpts:

Eschewing Nobel Prize economists, I left analysis of the legislature’s approval of a kudzu-like growth of casino gambling to an actor-comedian who loves Chicago and works Las Vegas.

“Al Capone actually just went to God and said, ‘This isn’t right. If these guys can do this, somebody owes me an apology,’ ” said the entertainer Larry Miller.

The smell of desperation on slot machines permeates our political class. Legislators are hamstrung by a Gordian knot of deficits, fear of raising taxes and spinelessness in making cuts. Many are as concerned about rigging the redrawing of legislative district lines to preserve their jobs as they are about confronting pension and workers’ compensation debacles.

In “The Plan,” a smart 2006 book of “big ideas for America,” the co-authors, Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, wrote: “The nation is at war, the government is broke, Washington is on the take — and yet the deeper the pile of problems, the shallower the political system’s response.”

The nation is still at war, the government broke; Springfield is arguably beholden to special interests, and the system’s response is as shallow as the children’s end of a Park District pool.

History will assess the impact of playing a (Donald) Trump-like card on gambling and if we’ll go beyond proving it’s easier to get the poor to fork over money for declining services than to involve the affluent in creating great services for their tax dollars.