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60 Minutes asks whether casinos are creating, and not diverting, patrons.
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
60 Minutes asks whether casinos are creating, and not diverting, patrons.
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A piece on 60 Minutes this weekend asked a question that the gambling industry — and the many politicians who've allowed the proliferation of local, so-called "convenience" casinos — aren't eager to address: do these casinos merely attract gamblers who would spend their money out-of-state anyway, or do they create new gamblers?
At one point in the film, Governor Rendell loses his temper at interviewer Lesley Stahl, calling her and her producers "simpletons," and "idiots," for not understanding his point that casino patrons are going to gamble anyway:
"The biggest downside is that some people lose their paychecks. But understand, Lesley, they're not losing their paychecks because Pennsylvania instituted gaming. These people were losing their paychecks in Atlantic City, in Delaware at the racetracks, or in West Virginia."
But there's evidence to the contrary.
A 1999 report by the federally-mandated National Gambling Impact Study Commission noted that survey data "found that the
presence of a gambling facility within 50 miles roughly doubles the prevalence of problem and pathological gamblers."
It also cited a survey that found 7 or 9 communities reported a rise in problem and pathological gambling after a casino was introduced nearby.
In 2005, the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions found, according to an article in Science Daily, that:
A Casino within 10 miles of home has a significant effect on problem gambling and is associated with a 90 percent increase in the odds of being a pathological or problem gambler,
But some of the most compelling evidence this might be true is on display right now — just visit your local casino. During CP's 24-hour stay at Sugarhouse, for example, we found no shortage of people who had come from just miles away. One cab driver estimated that "I would say 90 percent of the people I take live less than eight blocks away."
Would all of those people have gone all the way Atlantic City instead — or would all of them have sought out illegal slots dens?
These are the critical questions and the ones that 60 Minutes demanded answers to in a way that hasn't been significantly tackled in the national mainstream media. Locally calls to the state's gambling addiction hotline have tripled. Meanwhile, crime certainly hasn't gone down. And for all the hoopla around revenues, PA faces its largest deficit in a decade. One has to wonder whether the state's reliance on gambling (its second highest revenue generator) might have something to do with that deficit and the failure to seek other revenue options (natural gas drilling tax perhaps?). At the end of the day, gambling as policy is economically and socially regressive (hitting the poor far more than the wealthy, ravaging other revenue, etc.) as well as morally bankrupt in terms of the fostering of addiction and poverty. It's a sad legacy for this Governor to leave.
[...] 60 Minutes аѕkѕ whether casinos аrе сrеаtіחɡ, ... [...]
"It [gaming] is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief." George Washington
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