Pennsylvania’s relentless gambling expansion has paid off for legislators. The Gaming Control Board reported that the state government collected $2.3 billion in taxes for the 2023 fiscal year, which ended June 30, on $5.5 billion in legal gambling proceeds.
That’s an annual record and a $140 million increase over the previous fiscal year. And the state’s share of the casino vigorish already is on a trajectory to set a new record, with tax revenue up 9% in July over the same month a year ago.
Many legislators overcame their initial reticence about gambling nearly 20 years ago, once the money started rolling into the Treasury. They regard gambling revenue as free money with scant political blowback because it’s the result of an invisible tax. Gamblers who lose to the slots, table games or sports books — the true source of all that gambling revenue — lose to the house rather than to the government, and never see the tax in play.
Lawmakers never have dealt with substantial economic and social fallout from being croupiers. Big casinos diminish, rather than enhance, economic development in surrounding areas and compete with much smaller, locally owned businesses for entertainment dollars. They also foster socially and economically expensive addiction and the dysfunction that goes with it.
The Sunday Times reported this week that a state Gaming Control Board crackdown on gamblers leaving unattended children in cars, hotel rooms and food courts while they gambled in casinos produced disturbing results.
Since January 2022, the state gambling regulator announced that it had recorded 269 cases involving 441 children left unattended by gamblers, including at least three at Mohegan Pennsylvania in Plains Twp. Of those children, 68 were age 6 or younger.
The board’s administrative remedy, which it imposed 30 times over the period, is to bar those people from casinos.
That is inadequate to address the problem. Leaving a child unattended to gamble is a signature of addiction. Lawmakers should create a specific criminal offense for doing so and fund mandatory addiction treatment for those found guilty. Even in gambling-happy Pennsylvania, lawmakers should stand for people gambling with children’s lives.
— The Citizen’s Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS
