Salvation For Liberalism Not To Be Found In Rivers Casino

J.J. Jackson | September 30, 2009 

I am not against gambling. I think that if someone wants to spend their money on games of chance knowing the rules going in then they should be allowed to do so. What I have always been against however is government run gambling from state lotteries, which are nothing more than a voluntary tax like any sales tax would be and which are used to fund all sorts of grandiose plans that officials cannot get direct taxes increased to cover, on down.

When there is a budget shortfall, the government likes the prospect of gambling that it can control to raise revenues. But it will not allow gambling that it cannot control and dangle the prospect of a big payoff in front of the people they hope to lure through the doors to fund their latest endeavor. We here in Pennsylvania have, for example, a state lottery system the fees of which go to the government in order to operate all sorts of assorted programs for certain groups (like Senior Citizens). But if you think you can start a private statewide lottery which would not tithe the overlords in Harrisburg then think again. Likewise if you want to open a casino around here you will have to go hat in hand to the government in order to get permission and agree to give them a cut of the action. If you don’t you won’t have a casino to run.

We’ve been made a lot of promises from Fast Eddie and the other ne’er-do-wells in the capitol that state run gambling would solve so many problems in this state and give us bonuses like lower property taxes. I told everyone when these promises were made not to hold their breathe and years later people are still scratching their heads wondering when the fulfillment of these promises will occur. Why they actually believe the government year after year is a mystery.

More recently we had a little dust up here in the City of Pittsburgh when the state in its infinite wisdom decided that competition and the free markets were not a good enough model to follow and chose to issue just a single permit for a single casino. The decision gave whomever won the contest to be Big Brother’s favorite child a virtual monopoly in the local economy on slot machines. This all also happened to coincide with the Pittsburgh Penguins desperately in need of a new arena and an offer was made by one bidder that they would build the new facility free of tax payer expense in return for the sole casino license for the city.

The end result? Government told them to go pound salt and awarded the contract to another bidder (who went belly up and now a new entity is control of the project) and forcing the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on a new arena for the Penguins. Yes, government continues to find new ways to spend our money when it doesn’t have to. Isn’t life grand? All of this because instead of letting whomever wanted to build a casino out of their pocket build one and compete in the free marketplace government needed to show their muscles and flex their power.

Well, now this all brings me to the latest bit of bad news for the Commonwealth and the City in that the casino which won government favor enough to actually be built is having its bond rating lowered because it is not generating the revenues that everyone predicted!

Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating for casino affiliate Holdings Gaming Borrower one notch yesterday, from B to B-minus.
The agency cites concerns about what it calls the Rivers’ “weak operating performance” and its ability to meet debt service payments if there’s no change in fortunes.

Standard & Poor’s also put Holdings Gaming on its CreditWatch, with negative implications, meaning there’s about a 50 percent chance the rating could be dropped again.

The casino, which opened Aug. 9, has failed to produce revenues near its own estimates or those of the rating agency.

The best laid plans of government bureaucrats eh? With revenues off that also means that the benefit the government hoped to reap from wielding its power is also less than expected. Hope they didn’t spend all that money in one place and before it was collected. Oh, come on now … you know damn well that budgets for the next ten years have already included projections which are now not being met. Yeah, that’s the way it works at government house.

Now they will sweat over how best to fill that government shortfall because promises to political cronies and special interest voting blocks that keep electing them (and to whom most of this money goes) is more important than promises to tax payers they NEVER intended to keep anyway.


Contributor's website: http://www.libertyreborn.com



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