Crocodile tears for the tavern owners

On Friday tavern and restaurant owners who benefit enormously from Oregon's state sponsored gambling machines threatened Oregon's lottery officials by insisting that they will refuse to pick up the state's new electronic slot machines unless they get a larger cut of the revenues.  Currently they get a 28.8% cut on the video poker games, but lottery director, Dale Penn, has proposed a 15% take for tavern owners on the new slots, which will be played on the same machines as the video poker (the rate will stay the same on the video poker due to a contract the state has with the retailers.)

I've written about this topic once before and expressed my lack of sympathy for the tavern owners because I had the opportunity to meet one at a party once and it just so happened she was a Christian moralist.  That's right, a Christian moralist who was whining to me about how the corrupt Oregon state bureaucrats were taking too much of her hard earned video poker revenues from her bidness.  I asked her if her bidness would even make it without the video games and she sheepishly said it wouldn't. 

So what was she whining about?  What are all these owners whining about?  Where do they get their sense of entitlement anyway?  The state has given people the opportunity to open up crummy taverns that serve crummy cheap food and crappy beer, and where one can setup some gambling machines that attract gambling addicts who shove their paychecks into the machines, and where tavern owners get a 28.8% cut of the addicts' checks. 

Now the state is giving the people who decided to open up those crummy taverns with the crummy food yet another opportunity to make money by adding the slots.  The state just wants a bigger cut of the state sponsored gambling program.  The owners "claim" they won't put the slots in their businesses, but I urge Governor Kulongoski and the State Lottery Commission to call their bluff.  There will be owners who will use the slots and the gamblers will go to those businesses.  It's a pretty simple equation:  No slots, no gamblers, end of business.  Or you've got the tavern down the street:  Slots, gamblers, growing business. 

If all the tavern owners stick together and refuse the slots, then that's fine too.  As Oregonians we should be finding better ways to enhance state revenues rather than depending on revenues that encourage gambling addictions and end up costing our communities in other ways.

Comments

[ron]

Would the folks that are clamoring for the take from video poker and the new slots, just like a happily fighting couple, unite to oppose social host gambling where the house (or local bar) is prohibited from taking anything and where the law limits the stakes?

Both sides, the OEA and ORA, have unclean hands as far as I am concerned. It is symptomatic of modern legislation. The addiction is by anyone, public or private, that would substitute political influence as their boarding pass onto the boat that floats on a river of cash. (Preying upon gambling is the worst, even for the home price gamblers and the stock market gamblers too.)

The happily fighting couple analogy, oblivious to the world and the harm their fight causes everyone else, explains the root of the problem of the legal drug market too. Now how bad do you want that life saving drug? What are willing to give up for it in the political arena? Nobody can pay attention to anything else while the fight continues.

[Sid]

Yup,

It's a codependent relationship, and both parties need serious counceling to get off their addictions and make the state a better place for all.