Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has long promoted a city-owned casino as a way to solve Chicago’s huge public pension deficit of tens of billions of dollars. After all, Illinois casinos generated about 1 million in tax revenue in 2014. “Unfortunately the conclusion politicians seem to have reached is that more casinos will yield yet more revenue,” wrote Matt Patterson, executive director of the Center for Worker Freedom, a special project of Americans for Tax Reform, in a recent editorial.
Patterson stated there are three reasons why a city-owned casino in Chicago would be a bad idea.
“First, casino revenues are falling all over the country due to a saturation of the gaming market, including Illinois where, despite/because of a 27 percent increase in table games from 2007 to 2014, total gaming revenue fell from nearly $2 billion to $1.4 billion,” Patterson wrote. He noted one industry source said total casino gaming revenue in the state of Illinois feel
Second, Patterson stated, “Bureaucrats who project earnings for this hypothetical government-owned casino use privately owned casinos as the basis for their calculations because there are no wholly government-owned casinos in the United States. What is being proposed for Chicago would be unprecedented.” He pointed out publicly owned institutions in the U.S. include the post office and schools. “You get the idea,” Patterson stated.
Third, he said, revenues from a city-owned Chicago casino “would be offset by construction and operating costs (which would run into the tens of millions easily) and the displacement and/or destruction of existing businesses in that space.” Patterson asked, “How many restaurants or small businesses would have to be bought out and bulldozed by the city to build Rahm’s Empire of Dreams? How much would that cost? If some store owners refused to sell, would their property be taken from them through eminent domain? To ask the question is to answer it.”
Patterson proposed Emanuel is pushing the idea of a government-owned casino because it “would generate a couple thousand new de facto government jobs, perfect for doling out favors and payments to his allies.” He added, “With the city and state drowning in so much red ink, Bill Gates and the entire Saudi Royal Family would have to gamble and lose every week in that casino for 100 years to bail Illinois politicians out of their self-made mess.” He concluded, “More casinos will not mean substantially more tax revenue. But a government-owned casino would mean more government corruption.”
