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The Vice Spiral
The beauty of Ricochet is how one thought spawns another, a true ricochet of thoughts bouncing from one member to the next. David Sussman‘s post on Las Vegas got me thinking about the spiraling effects of lawmakers preying on their constituents’ weaknesses in order to wring every last available dollar out of them for, you know, the children.
Nevada has always been the industry leader. When divorce was a complicated procedure in America, Nevada filled the gap. In 1931, the state simplified its divorce laws and reduced its residency requirement to six weeks. They essentially created divorce tourism. By 1940, almost 5% of the total number of divorces filed in the US were in Nevada.
Divorce resorts cropped up everywhere, but especially in Reno. The town’s name became synonymous with the “quickie divorce.” In The Awful Truth (1937), Cary Grant quips, “The road to Reno is paved with suspicions.”
But when other states followed California into the Soviet-style “no-fault” system of divorce, that all came to an end.
In the same year that they created the divorce tourist, they also legalized gambling. That, too, would come crashing down as other states got into the act. At first it was New Jersey’s attempt to build Las Vegas East out of the ruins of the Atlantic City boardwalk. Then, in 1988, President Reagan signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act that allowed states to “partner” with Indian tribes to open casinos across the country.
Now there are plenty of places to lose your money but they’re so numerous that none of them are what you’d call “destination” places.
Colorado has now created “marijuana tourism.” While the state is benefiting right now, the true costs won’t be known for some time.
We do know the societal problems created by the first two legalized “vices.” But what we may not appreciate is that they are also agitating the monster they were supposed to placate. Take these two paragraphs from an article on legalized gambling in Social Work Today:
Gambling and its associated problems have been around for a long time. However, what is new is the recent increased opportunities to gamble as cash-strapped states desperate for new revenue streams relax prohibitions against slot machines, table games, and other forms of gambling.
And then it’s followed by this:
“The cost of problem gambling is high, both for the problem gambler and for their families,” Vander Linden says. “In most states, there is absolutely not adequate funding to address the problem.”
The man quoted is Mark Vander Linden, president of the Association of Problem Gambling Service Administrators. See, now that the states have created a bevy of problem gamblers the states need to find new streams of revenues to treat the problems. So they look for another vice to “regulate” and tax. It seems the merry-go-round just never stops spinning.
Published in Culture, Entertainment, General, Marriage
What exactly would they be using the money on that is inferior to gambling? Alcohol provides jobs, pointless consumption provides jobs, tobacco provides jobs, etc. There is no “blowing their money” from a pure capitalist perspective outside of burning it.
The article raises the issue of governments exploiting vice for profit. That’s not something you’d likel see on slate.
I’d fully expect the government to start encouraging the use of weed. Potheads are ideal democratic voters – stupid and unwilling to do anything other than be a slave. They are utterly useless for almost any constructive purpose, and unwilling to defend themselves.
When I was a boy, practically the only legal outlet for those who wanted to gamble was horse racing. The money laundering aspect was present, when newspapers referred to a person as a “colourful racing identity” everyone understood the implication that the person was involved in organised crime.
However, racing was an industry that employed a lot of people and a hobby for others who studied the form of horses, jockeys and trainers and knew the bloodlines of a large numbers of horses.
Racing is in steady decline because its overheads are so much higher than those of a cage filled with numbered balls and people have so many other interests. From a nation of enthusiasts who liked to stake money on their judgement we have become a nation of degenerate addicts.
Our governments are our pushers because they are addicted to the revenue stream and damn the social consequences. Better for them to pretend to offer solutions.
I’ve never been a gambler. I’m not interested in acquiring relevant knowledge and skill or engaging in mathematics, so for me it would just be throwing money away.
I did throw off a smoking addiction years ago and an important motivation for me was resentment of the amount of tax I was paying. So my suggestion for anyone wanting to reduce gambling, or any other government controlled vice, is to keep the message out there about the governments’ rake off.
The problem is price elasticity. Taxes are subject to this, too – if the price of something goes up, you typically buy less of it.
But that doesn’t apply to everything. Gas prices will go up but truckers still need to deliver their goods, so they’ll still buy it at whatever price it is. The same with sin taxes, which is why they’re so popular with state legislatures. You always raise a sin tax and not have a marginal reduction in revenue growth, which is basically saying there’s little downside to raising them.
Which is, at best, an amoral approach to raising revenue. Some small percentage of the sin tax revenues will get spent on hiring 4 administrators to “counsel” gambling addicts, say, and suddenly the morality of such taxation is assuaged with the taxation of people who are addicted to self-destructive behavior.
If heroin addicts had money, there would be a heroin tax. Count on it.
I am entirely in favor of the sin taxes. This seems a prudent way to provide a disincentive to bad behavior while raising needed revenue.
The problem is that when the government makes money off of it things get awful. The government goes for really bad real estate deals because of the prospects of casino revenue. The government runs a lottery and spends well over half of the proceeds on TV ads to promote gambling, which hurts vulnerable families. The government gets greedy about alcohol taxes and gets in to the business of alcohol sales.
These practices are bad for society, and end up putting additional stress on our safety net welfare programs.