By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Going to the voting booth imagining that casinos will benefit your family, community or state is equivalent to going to a casino imagining that you’ll leave as a big winner. In both cases someone will end up with a lot of money, and it’s a sucker’s bet that it will be you.

Family

For excellent moral, health, and economic reasons, U.S. casinos were only in Nevada until 1977, when a state that didn’t have much else going for it was joined by a city in New Jersey that didn’t either. As in Monte Carlo and Macao, the early Las Vegas casinos tended to draw high rollers who could afford to lose at big-stakes table games and often travelled long distances to do so.

In the late 1980s, Casinos began metastasizing into mainstream America. An unholy alliance of grifters and government promoted them as good clean “fun” rather than criminal enterprises.

The “gaming” industry laughably calls today’s casinos, “resorts.” Instead of entertaining high rollers who travel long distances, the “resorts” extract as much as possible from working people and retirees who travel less than 75 miles.

Their primary means of doing so is slot machines. The Wynn Resorts casino sited across the river from us anticipates offering 3,000 slot machines and only 150 table games. Even those table games are often run by a computer, which affords greater profit margins than paying a human would.

Today’s slots are not the machines that beloved New York Mayor La Guardia called “mechanical pickpockets” when he campaigned to eliminate them. They are sophisticated computers that gobble pay cards rather than coins and make multiple bets with the push of a single button.

They and their environment are carefully designed to put players into a hypnotic “zone” where bets are fast and continue until a player reaches the point that the gaming industry calls, “extinction,” meaning “broke.” Slot machines sucker players by delivering “near misses” and small wins that are less than the amount bet, but ultimately maximize “REVPAC,” another industry term meaning, “revenue per available customer.”

People who play slots are more likely to become addicted than those engaged in any other form of gambling. A particularly well-designed study found that the machines themselves were responsible for their users’ addiction rather than gamblers’ personal traits or pre-existing conditions.

Casinos’ revenue base depends on what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders calls “problem gamblers.” One study found that casual gamblers comprise 75% of players but contribute only 4% of net gambling revenue.

The impact on problem gamblers’ families is brutal. Bonds of trust disintegrate. Families endure debt burdens, loan defaults, bankruptcy, loss of homes and businesses, divorce, and sometimes homelessness.

The suicide rate of compulsive gamblers’ spouses is as much is as much as 150 times that of the general population. Kids frequently feel abandoned and literally are, as the funds that would support their wellbeing and future education enrich casino owners instead.

Community

Suckers like Everett mayor Carlo DeMaria imagine that a casino will boost local businesses sales, stimulate demand for new businesses, and employ lots of grateful voters. They should listen to what Steve Wynn himself told local businessmen when he was hustling to put a casino in Bridgeport:

“There is no reason on earth for any of you to expect for more than a second that just because there are people here, they’re going to run into your restaurants and stores just because we build this [casino] here.”

Consider Atlantic City. Before casinos came it had 242 eating and drinking establishments. Three years later there were 160, and that decline has continued. There isn’t even a large supermarket there now. New Jersey has spent $30 million on a marketing campaign to bail out Atlantic City, but it remains a dump.

Casinos take business away from local enterprises, and they divert money that would otherwise be spent on local activities. They buy their needed goods and services from large regional and national vendors rather than from local businesses.

Moreover, states afford casinos privileges that local businesses do not enjoy. The Massachusetts Legislature, for example, has decreed that the three proposed casinos can give away free alcohol to keep suckers in the zone, but local bars are not allowed to heavily discount drinks for happy hour.

Twenty-five years of American “resorts” tell us that certain businesses do multiply when casinos come to town. They are pawnbrokers, payday lenders, auto title lenders, check-cashing operations, and divorce attorneys.

A study that looked at casino gambling in 300 Metropolitan Statistical Areas found that the presence of a casino reduces voluntarism, civic participation, family stability, and other forms of social capital within 15 miles of a community where it is located. Other studies have tracked declines in property values surrounding a casino.

And what about the 8,689 jobs that Massachusetts casino owners promise to create by sometime in 2017? A majority of them won’t pay a living wage.

That may be one reason why the industry has a 40% turnover rate. Another is suggested by a growing body of evidence that casino workers have more health problems than the general population.

Then there’s a real question regarding how many of the higher paying jobs will go to locals. By year’s end, between 8,000 and 10,000 casino workers who have lost their jobs this year to four Atlantic City casino closures will be looking for work in their field.

State

For thirty years, Massachusetts legislators voted against legalizing casinos. Between 2006 and 2011, the gaming industry spent $11.4 million lobbying state politicians, and they hooked three highly placed suckers: Governor Deval Patrick, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate President Therese Murray.

These three were able to engineer the November 2011 vote to approve casinos, even though they each subsequently acknowledged that they didn’t want one in their own communities. If they took their oaths of office seriously, they wouldn’t want one in their state either.

Massachusetts operates the most successful lottery in the U.S. It delivers about 20% of its revenues to the state treasury. That’s just under a billion dollars a year, 89% of which goes to unrestricted direct local aid. ‘Villens are in the top 10% of state aid recipients.

Casinos would deliver only about 2% of their revenues to state government, while analysts estimate that they would cannibalize between 10% and 24% of the lottery’s current revenues.

The new bureaucracy required to regulate Massachusetts casinos would cost as much as $20 million. But that’s a fraction of what the state would shell out.

Extensive peer-reviewed studies find that casinos bring increased substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide. Violent crime, theft, and bankruptcy go up 10% in communities that allow gambling. Researchers from Baylor and the Universities of Illinois ad Georgia found that crime increases cost residents of counties with casinos about $65 per person per year.

No matter how you look at it, casinos are a bad deal for families, communities and states. But as P.T. Barnum, Paper Collar Joe Bessimer, Michael Cassius McDonald and a dozen other grifters are all reported to have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” They’ll be the ones voting against Ballot Question 3 in November.