A bad gamble

If ever there was a cure worse than the disease, it would be the measures being pushed by state Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, to bring gambling back to South Carolina in order to eliminate the state's ballooning $350 million deficit.

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One Ford bill pre-filed a few weeks ago would allow dockside gambling as is done in Mississippi, Louisiana and Missouri. Another bill that he introduced last year, and which is currently hung up in a legislative subcommittee, would bring back video poker establishments.

He'd get rid of the deficit by taxing the gambling enterprises at a rate of 25 percent - a tax that was not applied to video poker before the state Supreme Court banned it in 2000.

"If we had taxed it, it would have generated $750 million for the state," said Ford - more than enough to wipe out the deficit and avoid damaging cuts in Medicaid, education and other key government services.

True enough, but he's only looking at the plus-side of the ledger. There are huge social costs in terms of addictive gambling, broken families, suicides, neglected children, crime, etc., that go on the minus-side of the ledger.

When those liabilities are added up, the state has more to lose than it has to gain if it gambles on gambling to solve its deficit problems.

It's a bit like a gambler who, having lost all his stake, borrows more to gamble away in the hope that a big win is around the corner.

A video poker tax is not worth losing the life of even one child left in a locked car on a hot summer day while a gambling-addicted parent spends hours at a video poker machine trying to hit it big. This happened more than once when South Carolina was infested with the video poker virus.

We warn this year, as we did last year, that anti-gambling lawmakers - who constitute a large majority in the General Assembly - must guard against any legislative legerdemain to sneak in a gambling loophole on some bill being rushed through, especially during the session's always-hectic final days in June when lawmakers are tired and inattentive.

The gambling industry is always on the alert to worm its way back into the state.

--From the Tuesday, January 6, 2004 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle