Illinois botches video gambling

Perhaps it's fortunate that Illinois has outlawed capital punishment. The Prairie State cannot do anything right. Because if a convict was strapped onto a lethal injection gurney I can see the witnesses being dealt the fatal dose, not the creep who was sentenced.

Video gambling, legalized here in 2009, was supposed to rescue, or at the very least alleviate, the fiscal morass the Land of Mary Todd Lincoln Spending got itself into.

But of course that didn't work.

From ProPublica Illinois:

The machines, which legislators said would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the cash-strapped state, are spread out over 6,800 establishments, dotting highways and towns from Winnebago County in the north to Alexander County in the south. Step outside the borders of Chicago, where video gambling remains illegal, and you will see feather flags, billboards and neon signs advertising video slots and poker in bars and restaurants, truck stops and storefront gambling parlors.

Illinois now has more locations to legally place a bet than Nevada.

But the meteoric rise of video gambling has proven to be little more than a botched money grab, according to a ProPublica Illinois investigation of a system that has gone virtually unchecked since its inception. Based on dozens of interviews, a review of thousands of pages of state financial records and an analysis of six years of gambling data, this unprecedented examination found that far from helping to pull the state out of its financial tailspin, the legalization of video gambling instead accelerated it and saddled Illinois with new, unfunded regulatory and social costs.

Meanwhile, video gambling companies have exploited the deeply flawed legislation to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, while the cities and towns that bear the brunt of the social costs related to gambling receive a fraction of those proceeds.

Thank you to a friend of the blog for the story tip.