State government again is wringing its hands about gambling, commissioning another study of its social costs, a study that itself is expected to cost $700,000. Connecticut law used to require such studies every five years but they were suspended after the 1996 study and it is hard to see the need for another one. For it is not going to report anything the state doesn’t already know, and the state’s options are practically nil anyway.
Connecticut knew full well about the social costs 15 years ago when it plunged into wholesale gambling with the opening of the Mashantucket Pequots’ Foxwoods casino and 11 years ago with the opening of the Mohegan tribe’s Mohegan Sun casino.
The social costs have been debated off and on since 1991 when the General Assembly refused to repeal the “Las Vegas nights” charity fund-raising law that a federal court had construed as allowing Indian casinos to open in Connecticut. And every week since Foxwoods opened has brought news reports about embezzlements, robberies, burglaries, and child abandonments attributed to state residents suffering from a compulsion to gamble at the casinos.
While the social costs can’t be precisely quantified, by making its deals with the tribes state government decided that those costs are amply covered by the tribute it receives from the casinos, currently more than $430 million per year. And whatever the social costs, they are mostly off state government’s books, recorded mostly on the books of afflicted individuals and their families.
Hands Tied
Besides, state government now could not suspend casino gambling even if it wanted to, the tribes having gained a property right to operate casinos on their reservations and being largely independent of state government. The only thing state government might do about gambling now is to bestow more money on the social service groups that minister to problem gamblers.
But casino gambling can be a bonanza for a state government only when it draws people and money from other states. When it draws mostly from its host state, casino gambling becomes entirely parasitic and destructive to the local economy, taking money from the many and delivering it to the few, the casino’s owners.
Having watched their residents spend hundreds of millions of dollars at the Connecticut casinos, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are moving toward authorizing their own. That would cut off Connecticut’s casino traffic from the north and east, leaving the state’s casinos to compete with Atlantic City and the upstate New York Indian casinos for traffic from the New York City area. Then it might not be long before New York capitulated and allowed casinos near the city, leaving Connecticut’s casinos only Connecticut itself.
At that point the social costs of casino gambling in Connecticut might start to seem greater than the revenue to state government. But even then state government would not need a study to figure it out. The reports of the state Department of Special Revenue will show it, as they already show that the state’s casino revenue is stagnating as casinos spread throughout the country. And when Connecticut is surrounded by casinos, as close as New York, Boston, and West Warwick, even somehow closing Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun probably would do little to reduce gambling’s social costs here.
No, the only way to diminish the social costs of gambling may be to diminish government’s hunger for revenue. Now if only there was a social-service group to minister to compulsive government.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
