Expert: Missouri may re-criminalize gambling
By Allen Palmeri
Staff Writer
December 13, 2005
JEFFERSON CITY – Missouri could very easily follow the lead of Illinois and look at re-criminalizing its casinos for the good of its citizens, according to a University of Illinois professor who testified Nov. 22 before the Joint Committee on Gaming and Wagering at the Capitol.
John Warren Kindt told a panel of four senators and three representatives that the Illinois House of Representatives on Oct. 27 voted 67-42 to re-criminalize its casinos. The Illinois Senate is expected to begin considering the bill in January. Any Missouri lawmaker troubled by “the socioeconomic negatives” of gambling could sponsor a similar bill, he said.
“It just takes leadership looking at the facts that gambling is lose-lose for the state,” Kindt said. “The conventional wisdom is incorrect. Education is being hurt by gambling revenues. That’s really a scam that’s been perpetrated on the educational community. The studies show that those states which have gambling lotteries and more gambling have less funding in real dollars to education than those states which don’t have the gambling.
“We haven’t had widespread gambling for most of the 20 th century. It was criminalized for a reason. It hurts the economy, it creates crime, and it hurts education.”
Kerry Messer, lobbyist for the Missouri Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, said that Missouri’s political establishment is in firm disagreement with the idea that gambling hurts the economy. Since 1992, when Missouri voted in a limited form of riverboat gambling, politicians and citizens have taken on the mindset that gambling revenues help education. Changing the prevailing view will take time, Messer noted.
“I think we’re still several years away from this (re-criminalizing gambling) ever becoming a reality,” he said. “The rich hope in what we’re seeing in Illinois is that Illinois is a much more corrupt political state than what Missouri has ever been. As a result of that, there’s great hope that maybe as a nation and as a society our culture is moving in the direction of maybe redeeming ourselves from the plight of gambling.”
Kindt, who has testified before Congress and about half of the state legislatures on gambling, said the lusts of state lawmakers looking for new revenue streams without raising taxes have jeopardized the public health, safety and welfare of many American citizens. When the gambling industry gets a foothold in a state, the politicians tend to be easily swayed, he said.
“Money talks,” Kindt said. “Fifty years ago, it used to be called bribery. Now they’re called political contributions.
“People need to decide it on the facts. But if they’re influenced by the money, they start to massage the numbers and pretty soon they think they’ve got a winner when in fact it isn’t.”
The recent bent in Jefferson City has been to dump the state’s $500 loss limit every two hours for the sake of pumping more money into education. So far the gambling industry has been denied, but Messer anticipates their influential array of lobbyists once again will attempt to sell their agenda to the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2006. It took an impromptu, grassroots filibuster in May, led by Sen. John Loudon, R-Chesterfield, and a handful of Senate Democrats, to thwart an establishment-led initiative to get rid of the loss limit.
Kindt said the loss limit is sound public policy.
“It slows the process of people becoming addicted to gambling,” he said.
The idea that pro-family lobbyists could move beyond having to defend the loss limit every year is encouraging, Messer said. There may come a day, he said, when more Missouri pastors will rise up in their pulpits and call gambling evil, thus making it easier for Missouri lawmakers and a pro-family governor like Matt Blunt to tell the gambling industry to pick up its chips and go elsewhere.
“ Missouri has never fully accepted the concept that gambling across the board should be legalized,” Messer said. “We’ve just taken specific areas and said, ‘Let’s experiment with this.’ And the experiment is failing.”