What's the argument against sports gambling

[NI4NI]

as long as expierenced professional oddsmakers set the lines?

Delaware better do something to recoup the lost revenue to Pennsylvania slots, or should we expect more cuts in county services along with higher school taxes?

[jberryhill]

1. "recoup the lost revenue to Pennsylvania slots"

...and then PA puts in sports betting.

What next? Dogfights?

Let me be clear. I grew up within spitting distance of Delaware Park. Mis-spent significant portions of my youth there. In college and grad school, I was a regular attender at the harness races at Brandywine. I go to Vegas about twice a year, and the same for Atlantic City. I probably gamble more than most people. I have fun doing it, and set a budget for it. You can spent four hours with your SO at the track and have a blast with $40 and a cooler, or you can go to a 90 minute movie and snacks for the same amount. That's what I call entertainment value. Once in a while, you even come back with the same $40.

I spend hours pondering the imponderables - if a horse can do a mile in 1:38 on a dry track in Laurel in the spring, then will he outrun a horse that did 6 furlongs in 1:11 on a muddy track last fall at Aqueduct, in today's race at DelPark going 7 furlongs on turf? To me, that kind of question ranks right up there with "What is the meaning of life?"

So please don't mistake me for someone who doesn't relate to gambling, but I believe that the whole country has gone way overboard. State legislatures have developed an addiction to it.

These folks come in and tell us about how gambling is going to provide all this "free money" and "extra revenue", but when it falls off we hear this kind of "lost revenue" talk.

The same state that is supposed to teach our kids math puts up billboards showing happy lottery winners on a game that pays 50% of the true odds. That's just criminal. You want to make up the "lost revenue"? I'd suggest authorizing the State Police to just mug people every now and then before I'd feel as if we needed more gambling opportunities.

Lower the smoking age to 12, and make it up in cigarette taxes. What the hell... kids LIKE smoking, and nobody's going to live forever. You know, I once read that each cigarette takes five minutes off of your life. So if it takes you seven minutes to smoke a cigarette, then you are coming out two minutes ahead. If you don't smoke, you don't live longer - it only feels longer.

Buy out the motels in New Castle and convert them to state-run drug dens and whorehouses (from their current private status). Cars will be backed up all the way across the Del. Mem. Br. Someone remind me when it was... 1980 or so when we shut down all of the "relaxation and conversation studios" that sprang up after we shut down the "massage parlors". We used to have a whorehouse on Kirkwood Highway and two on Concord Pike back in the day. All that wonderful revenue - lost to "Champ's Pizza".

It's not as obvious around here, because we don't have a lot of Indian reservations within an appreciable short distance in these parts, but when I travel I am continually amazed at how effective the casino gangs, oh, excuse me, management companies, have been at dotting the map from one end of this country to another with gambling joints. I drove from Seattle to Vancouver, and I think I counted more casinos than there are on the Strip.

It's a saturated market. When we brought the slots in to Delaware - excuse me - automated lottery devices into Delaware (we do not have slot machines in the State of Delaware, we have automated lottery contest devices), the idea was to primarily to support the tracks. I can't speak for Harrington or Dover, but the higher purses have absolutely improved the quality of racing at DelPark. But when we did that, it was a very different market than it is today.

This thing with "Hey, gambling revenue is falling off. I know, let's authorize MORE gambling." strikes me, a gambler, as the logic of someone who has fallen into degenerate compulsion.

The revenue falloff is due to the smoking ban. You've got people who used to have reinforcing addictions and you've put their addictions at cross-purposes. It's one thing to suck in nicotine while pushing a button on a slot machine and getting rewarded randomly for it. It's another thing to have the nicotine pulling you out of the building. Once they are outside - the spell is broken and they figure they might as well leave if they aren't winning.

A few weeks ago in Vegas I found out that even there, they instituted a general indoor smoking ban - with one exception. Guess where you can smoke indoors in Vegas? They aren't that freaking stupid.

What you can't do in PA is smoke and gamble. If they could do that here, they'd come in droves. If they ban it in Jersey, we'll pull in people from Atlantic City.