Beware the murky residue

I’ve heard some bad metaphors before, but this one takes the cake: a “gambling expert” explains that in the bathtub that is Las Vegas, you can’t see the “dirt ring” left by gambling, but in Pennsylvania you will be able to see it. I wish this was a joke.

From McCall.com:

Likening the Lehigh Valley to a bathtub, two experts said Thursday gambling could either fill it with money or drain cash and businesses from the community to faraway places such as Nevada.

University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor William N. Thompson said he expects a $175 million drain on the local economy if slot machines come to Bethlehem.

”Get real, Pennsylvania,” he said at a breakfast forum in the city.

But Michael Pollock, managing director of Spectrum Gaming Group of Pennington, N.J., said gaming, if well-managed, can function as an economic engine, driving other businesses to grow.

”If coordinated by the government with existing tourism, it can work,” Pollock said.

Before a crowd of 100 community leaders and business people, Thompson lectured that money does not grow on trees, but rather, comes from people’s pockets.

Thompson, a political scientist who has written numerous books on the gambling business, said to think of gaming as a bathtub: Casinos bring in money and fill up the bathtub. In Las Vegas, it fills up so high that you can’t see the dirt ring. But in other places, the tub has leaks and the money doesn’t stay in the region.

”In the Lehigh Valley, will the bathtub leak or will it hold water?” he said.

Expert warns of murky residue from gambling

That’s pretty weak. I don’t believe someone paid for that kind of “analysis.”

It must be great to be so glib about complex issues like economic development. I question the whole idea that gambling has a “social cost” in a way that is different from the “social cost” for any kind of business or commercial development. Everything has some kind of “social cost:” spending money on X means not having any for Y.

How you get up in front of a group of people and talk about the consequences of gaming-related economic devleopment like it’s a commercial for Oxy-Clean and retain any shred of dignity is beyond me.