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Funny numbers in DeLeo casino plan
By adamg on Fri, 04/02/2010 - 10:18am
A shame there won't be any debate. Jack Sullivan at CommonWealth runs DeLeo's numbers, discovers that to meet the tax-revenue numbers he's claiming, the two proposed casinos would have to bring in a total of between $5.6 billion and $7 billion a year in revenue. Nice change, but he notes that Las Vegas's 266 casinos currently make a combined total of $11.6 billion in gross receipts each year. Does that add up?
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Gambling = Few winners, many losers
http://www.weeklydig.com/news-opinions/feature/200...
"Rigorous, independent analysis of the fiscal considerations of expanding legal gambling are scarce, to say the least," says an extensive report written in 2002 for former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift. The only available revenue estimates for casinos are funded by biased sources, it notes, and their projections of hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs could be faulty.
"Such studies often overestimate benefits and underestimate costs," says a survey conducted by Harvard's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston in 2005. Notably, its authors found "little difference between employment rates" in communities with casinos and communities without them.
"Predictions done before [casino] development are notoriously inaccurate," argues the 2003 report of the Rhode Island Special House Commission to Study Gaming.
"Much of what [research] does exist is flawed because of insufficient data, poor or undeveloped methodology, or researchers' biases," asserts the report of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, a federal panel that assessed the costs and benefits of gambling in 1999.
Guessing the numbers came
Guessing the numbers came from the same place they always come from - Clyde Barrow. In which case, of course they don't add up.
DeLeo, and any other MA
DeLeo, and any other MA politician that is thinking of voting for this, should talk to people in Rhode Island, where they have slot machines at race tracks, about the poor employment situation there and how little help these slots have given. Then factor in that they had the benefit of people in MA going to their racinos, the reverse will obviously not happen since they have them in RI. It seems like the fix is in, why are the prices set for slots? Why not let people bid for them, instead of just dreaming up a price and handing it to select companies?