Gaming: been here before
This month the State of Connecticut went searching at the end of another rainbow, and hopes it found another pot of gold. Whether legalized sports gambling will be that pot of gold remains to be seen, but state politicians – always looking for more ways to fill state coffers – hope it is the next big thing.
Sports betting has been around for decades, football slips, pools, prior to daily numbers, people “played the numbers” with their local bookies, and then big payoff games like Powerball were added to the mix. What was once illegal because the state couldn’t tax it, became legal when the state joined the game. In every case, Connecticut, and other states, hoped it would be a big payday, and add to their treasuries.
According to the state’s own website and various sports betting operations, which stand to make millions, the state’s casino sites will be the first to place bets, which other sites added – much like Off-Track Betting.
The state politicians are salivating over this new delve into vice, hoping to generate an additional $30 million in the next fiscal year, with the payout growing to $83 million in five years. The casinos offered the betting first, with Off-Track Betting sites and state-licensed sites coming on-line once some procedural issues were determined.
If we sound a bit underwhelmed by the new gaming and the hoped-for bonanza, we are. Since the 1970s, Connecticut and other states have increased their participation in gaming all in the hopes of increasing the bottom line. When the state lottery was first introduced in the mid-1970s, it was to improve education with the added money going toward schools. Of course, the money received was put into the general fund, and then (at least theoretically) found its way into school spending. At the time we remember saying it was the only “trickle down economics” the state’s Democratic majority liked.
Some 40-plus years since it was introduced, school spending has gone up, Connecticut pays one of the highest per-pupil rates in the nation, but somehow there’s never enough. More spending creates more expansion, which creates the need for more money. How this helped students is anyone’s guess. Scores are down, kids are functionally illiterate, and now we have things like Critical Race Theory and the bogus 1619 Project muddying the works.
While politicians are hoping this is the next best thing, putting more dollars in their grubby little hands, we all know better. It’s axiomatic: the more they get, the more they spend. The late President Ronald Reagan once said the closest thing we have to eternal life here on earth are federal programs. Add to that mix state programs – all intended to spend what comes into the treasury.
The Lottery, Off-Track Betting, Powerball, the income tax –all were supposed to end the state’s insatiable need for more money by furnishing those funds. But the need is insatiable. New programs will be pushed as “necessary” and, using the new buzz word “equitable,” getting passed. They will cost money in implementation and bureaucracy, and the cycle continues.
The new sports betting panacea will be short-lived. The General Assembly will spend, spend, spend, and the receipts will not outpace the spending. Newer and more exotic ways will be floated to get more money. We’ve seen this act before. We know how it ends.