[Bubba]

Originally Posted by Mike B.

In 1994, Donald Trump, owner of the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, was quoted as saying, “People will spend a tremendous amount of money in casinos, money that they would normally spend on buying a refrigerator or a new car. Local businesses suffer because they’ll lose customer dollars to the casino.”
It's estimated that our fellow citizens -- statistically our poorest neighbors -- will have to wager and lose more than $900 million each year for the State of Kansas to get its $200 million payoff.
The following facts apply to the For & Anti casino proponents, the gamblers & non-gamblers alike:
(1) A fool and his/her money are soon parted.
(2) Make no mistake, the house (meaning casino) always wins; it’s a given.
(3) Gambling (or gaming, take your pick) results in economic depravity, not development.
We are going to lose millions of dollars that are now spent at local businesses. State revenues will go down and social impact costs will go up. It will hurt all the entertainment industry, and it will hurt retail.

Rebuttal to statement in bold above...

Q: The odds on the lottery are horrendous.

Fahrenkopf: Well, statistical odds are that -- I'm quoting from some studies that have been done by some of the gaming magazines -- that, if you walk into a casino, the casino out of a hundred dollars is gonna owe maybe eight or nine dollars. You're going to walk out over a period of time gaming with more than ninety percent that you walked in with. If you go to a horse track or dog track, they're gonna hold about thirty three dollars, and you'll walk home with about sixty six dollars. But lotteries -- the odds of winning the lotteries are around fifty percent.

So, you know -- but again, people gamble for different reasons. Some like to go in a casino and like to hear the bells going off. Others like to go to their seven-eleven and buy a lottery ticket picking the numbers of their childrens' birthday, their anniversary day, or whatever. So different strokes for different folks.

I can't speak for everybody, but I think that "losing" $10 out of $100 over time is pretty cheap entertainment. Compare that to myself going to the theater, in the afternoon at a reduced admission, and buying a popcorn and a drink, I "lose" $10-$20 pretty easily for a couple hours of entertainment.