Gambling Math

Like the jelly of the month club gambling promoters always need a new hook, a new spin, a new con to make people believe gambling serves a public good. This year the hook appears to be education—at least that is the promise being made in a major campaign to open casino gambling in Ohio. The gambling moguls are promising to give high school students college scholarships if their moms and dads will legalize casinos. Here’s the math: The casinos will drain $2.5 billion from the Ohio economy—at least most of it from Ohio. In return the gambling moguls will place $700 million each year into a scholarship fund. Qualifying high school grads can get tuition scholarships, provided they stay in Ohio to go to college. The casinos don’t want you to notice that they will keep $1.8 billion for themselves. They want everyone to focus on the kids getting tuition scholarships. But here is the real math question. What if parents didn’t gamble their paychecks away and chose to save every year for their kids education. If $700 million is a big number for scholarships, how much bigger and better and smarter is the idea of parents keeping their money and investing $2billion every year? For that matter, what if Americans gave up gambling altogether—especially senior citizens? Can you imagine the billions of dollars that would suddenly become available to pay for health care, prescription drugs and education? The gambling industry loves to tell us what we get if we play along. They never want us to see what playing their game really costs.