Stupidity should be taxed
The Boston Globe op-ed columnist Derrick Z. Jackson has lunched a two part assault on casino gambling in Massachusetts. One wonders why he stretched it to two parts since the first installment is complete garbage. Mr. Jackson tries to show that casino gambling won’t create much – if any -revenue for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but makes a complete hash of it, probably because casinos undeniably pull in enormous revenues.
Let me put casinos in a context that Mr. Jackson can find appealing:
Income tax is a tax on work. That’s not very desirable.
Capital gains tax is a tax on productivity. Not very desirable.
Property tax is a tax on wealth. Not very desirable.
Gambling is a tax on stupidity. Very, very desirable. Now, a typical objection is that gambling is a tax on poor, and that’s true in the sense that poor people often make stupid decisions, like buying lottery tickets, but stupidity is a lot more lucrative when it comes in the form of five or six figure bet placed by a wealthy individual on some asinine wager. Yeah, gambling may well fleece the poor, but it soaks the rich.
Granted, had Connecticut not had any caisnos, I would have been against licensing them here, but since reality is what it is, the Commonwealth should take commonsense steps to hold on to the dollars that its citizens blow down there.
Mr. Jackson’s next column is supposed to be about casinos and crime. I am quite looking forward to him describing Connecticut’s reservations as cesspools of crime. OK, he’ll probably be a little more general than that and rely heavily on Earl L. Grinols’s and David B. Mustard’s paper “Measuring Industry Externatlities: The Curious Case of Casinos and Crime.” It claims that casino increases the cost of crime by $65 per adult in the county it’s in. So if Massachusetts built a casino in Worcester county it would increase the cost of crime by about $36 million, compared to the at least ten times as much as the casino is likely to generate for the Commonwealth. Perhaps Mr. Jackson will marshal some stronger arguments.
Update February 6:
This little nugget on Charles Barkley’s gambling habits illustrates my point:
In an ESPN interview in May 2006, Barkley estimated that he’d lost about $10 million gambling over the years.
He said Monday that he lost $2.5 million “in a six-hour period” one night last year.
“It’s a stupid, bad habit. I have a problem,” Barkley said. “But the problem is when you can’t afford it. I can afford to gamble. I didn’t kill myself when I lost two and half million dollars… I like to gamble and I’m not going to quit.”
The Boston Herald has an article by Scott van Voorhis today that reports on a survey which claims that Massachusetts residents spend $900 at casinos in Connecticut (“Mass. gamblers rambled–Study: 7 million trips for Conn. action”).
