Electronic gambling, slots job killers, family destroyers

People lose their money and many losers resort to criminal activities to obtain replacement monies. The definitive study took almost a decade and was published by University of Illinois Professor Earl Grinols and University of Georgia Professor David Mustard in the Review of Economics and Statistics (published by Harvard & MIT). Around electronic gambling/slots facilities, casinos, and racetracks with slots, the new crime increases approximately 10 percent per year—each and every year.

 

This Harvard-published study has been re-confirmed by the multi-volume 2009-2012 United States International Gambling® Report, produced in large part at the University of Illinois research facilities. These reports and studies are follow-ups to the bipartisan U.S. National Gambling Impact Study Commission, co-sponsored by former U.S. Senator Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.).

 

Furthermore, these academic studies categorize electronic gambling devices(EGDs)/slot machines as the “crack-cocaine” of gambling for creating new gambling addicts—similar to drug addiction. Teens and young adults, the Nintendo generation, are already at a 4 to 12 percent problematic gambling rate, which is double the gambling addiction rate of the older Baby Boomers Generation (2 to 6 percent).

 

Around gambling facilities, gambling families are spending 10 percent less on food and 25 percent less on clothing, and 37percent are raiding their bank savings accounts to dump the money into slot machines.

 

Slot machines do not create jobs. All the owners do is “dust them off and collect the money.” In fact, each slot machine costs the community one consumer job per machine per year—each and every year.

 

EGDs/slot machines are “job killers” because each machine effectively drains an average of $300,000 per year out of the consumer economy. That $300,000 per machine is money that is no longer being spent to buy cars, refrigerators, computers, and even the essentials of life.

 

Thus, this $300,000 in lost consumer spending translates into one lost job to the consumer economy per slot machine.

 

Owners of community-sited slot machines are benefiting themselves and not the community. In fact, the Congressional report sponsored by Lt. Gov. Sheila

Simon’s father, the U.S. National Gambling Impact Study Commission, called for no community-convenient slot machines and for the re-criminalization of EGDs/slot machines that were already located in communities.