 What isn't the gambling industry willing to do?
It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality. Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The commission won't (and can't) take any grand stand against gambling. Instead it will opt for small, targeted policies, concentrating on compulsive gambling. It will probably propose that casinos and state lotteries fund gambling-addiction research and that casinos take much stronger measures to bar problem gamblers from wagering. The commission may recommend that gaming taxes be used to underwrite treatment of pathological gamblers and that insurance companies be encouraged to cover gambling addiction. Similarly, the commission will try to reduce gamblers' access to cash by limiting the size of ATM advances and prodding casinos to remove the machines from their floors. It will call for heavier regulation of Indian gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. In short, it will treat gambling as a tobaccolike vice. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts.
 donate money to improve other areas of Las Vegas
 regulate online gambling  donate money for gambling-addiction research  donate money to improve other areas of Las Vegas  change their term to "gaming"