"A Silly Gamble" - Commentary by Tony Seton

A Silly Gamble

From the destroy in order to save department, the governor of Nevada is proposing to spend $200,000 over two years on a program to help problem gamblers. This is akin to Phillip Morris running self-congratulatory ads sending parents to their website where they can get advice on preventing their children from smoking.

An AP story on the Nevada largesse asked a gambler who nearly committed suicide nine years ago and now counsels compulsive gamblers what she thought of the governor’s move. She commented that it was "highly needed....[B]ut, personally, $200,000 is just a joke."

The governor’s office said that the money, which they hoped would be matched by the gaming industry, was just a start. Break it down and it comes to $275 a day, about the cost of a moderately-priced hotel room. To put it into more serious perspective, consider that the Nevada gambling industry rakes in a hundred thousand times that amount every day, or $11 billion a year. Nevada gambling already contributes a million dollars a year to programs dealing with gambling problems in the state, which amounts to nine-thousands of one percent of their revenues.

The Garden State comes in second with casino revenues of more than $4 billion and they give at least $600,000 to problem gambling programs each year. This from the executive director of the New Jersey Council on Problem Gambling, whose name, and I kid you not, is Looney.

Back in Nevada, a flack for the MGM Mirage said it’s appalling that the state hasn’t ponied up sooner, and deems the proposed sum, um, small, since the state collects about a billion a year in taxes on gambling and live entertainment.

Experts say that probably only two percent of the population are gambling addicts with maybe twice that many having a less severe version of the problem. In the Silver State, it is estimated that nearly 100,000 people, or 6.4 percent of the state, have gambling problems.

Gambling is one of those self-inflicted scourges, like smoking, alcoholism and voting for George Bush, and usually afflicts the poor and ignorant the hardest. Still, we allow companies to grow tobacco and to advertise beer on television, and these plagues actually kill a half-million Americans a year.

We shouldn’t stop people from gambling, at least until we shut down Wall Street, but in the meantime we should figure out a way to make the profiteers pick up the costs.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.