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Spinning Our Wheels As if closing all those firehouses isn’t already enough of a gamble, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated with a poker face in April that the city is looking into a mass infusion of slot machines to help close the huge budget gap. There have been proposals floating around New York for years to put gambling on an island. Who knew that island was going to be Manhattan? Reportedly, Times Square was at the top of the list. Am I hallucinating, or didn’t we just plunk down a couple of billion dollars to chase the three-card monte games from the same few blocks? This is a slippery slope that can end only with eight year old kids from Bensonhurst spending the day blowing their allowance on Mickey and Minnie one-armed bandits paying out 62 cents on the dollar. How long before Wayne Newton does a week at Penn Station? There should be some sadness and bitter irony felt when you draw a timeline from 9/11 to proposals like this one. It’s not every nineteen months you go from having a mayor who is an American icon to having a mayor who is a pit boss. Time to stop enforcing RICO laws and start beating the mob at its own game. Sure, you can’t light up anymore, but now your paycheck can go up in smoke. And we always thought the resident billionaire megalomaniac to foist casino-style gambling on the city would be named Donald. Oddly, there was a time when the same Michael Bloomberg invented a little machine that analyzed stocks and generated millions. The new Bloomberg machines will spin cherries and bars and take quarters from little old ladies. And in perhaps the most perverse of all ironies, we lose the subway token slots and get the slot machine slots. Why not simply keep the old turnstiles and vary the payout? The jackpot could be a token not eaten, a quiet, clean ride with your own seat, and an MTA not run by proteges of Kenneth Lay. And this way, we could think of the vandals sucking out coins as part of the action. While optimists might give this proposal a “B,” as in balancing the budget on the backs of bettors, realists know it gets a "D,” as in doing diddly to diminish the deficit. The dirty little secret about government-sponsored gambling is that it is a pernicious tax on the poor so regressive it makes the Bush economic plan look like the New Deal. What we’re being asked to bet on isn’t so much tough fiscal management as it is a stacking of the deck. We can call it merely the luck of the draw that virtually every major study commissioned on state-run gambling indicates an acceleration in state tabs for bankruptcies, child support, and addiction treatment, but odds are we’d be suckers. Beyond the risks of tackiness, social iniquity, and budget fallacies, we might want to take yet another look at what’s on the table. A raw deal like this one cannot be compared to legalizing gaming in the Catskills. New York City actually has a cultural history to preserve that goes beyond mahjong and hooking your niece up with the cute head waiter. If you want to see the future of New York under this plan, all you have to do is walk into any OTB. Everyone knows unconsciously the letters stand for “old timers and bums.” It’s times like these we have to ask ourselves if we want our children to wind up like Bill Bennett. Click here to rant back. |