Say Anything Blog

I’m all for legalizing gambling, but not in the name of turning it into a cash cow for the proponents of big government.

ATLANTA – A tell-tale sign America’s chips are down: States are increasingly turning to gambling to plug budget holes.

Proposals to allow or expand slots or casinos are percolating in at least 14 states, tempting legislators and governors at a time when many must decide between cutting services and raising taxes.

Gambling has hard-core detractors in every state, but when the budget-balancing alternatives lawmakers must consider include reducing education funding or lifting sales taxes, resistance is easier to overcome, political analysts said.

“Who wouldn’t be interested if you’re a politician who needs to fund programs?” said Bo Bernhard, director of research at the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — a government-funded program.

Now, again, I think gambling should be legal because the justifications for keeping it illegal (the moral judgments of those who are far too concerned with running their neighbors’ lives for their own good) are simply not good enough.  But I don’t think that gambling should be legalized explicitly to create another source of revenue for government.

The article above casts the situation as though political leaders were merely facing a choice between closing down schools and raising taxes, but the truth is that every single state budget in this country is loaded with more than enough wasteful spending that could be cut to keep necessary spending intact without having to cut taxes at all.  It’s just that the politicians don’t actually want to have to cut any of the spending (thus telling their deep-pocket special interest supporters that they won’t be delivering the goods any longer).

Far from expanding the horizons of government revenue sources, I think we need to consolidate the sources from which government gets its general revenue.  Use fees and taxes that closely tie the expense of a function of government to the people benefiting from that function are fine, but as for everything else we should want a limited few revenue streams that are very transparent as to how much we’re actually paying in.

Unfortunately, politicians love the current system where the manner in which we are taxed is so pervasive and confusing that putting a dollar figure to the total amount of money we give the various levels of government is something most of us couldn’t do without hours of research.

If we could do it at all.