Florida hopes to roll the dice.
Florida state Senate sponsor Ellyn Bogdanoff (R-Fort Lauderdale) and state House sponsor Erik Fresen (R-Miami) promise thousands of jobs and the millions of dollars if we just allow “destination resort casinos” in Florida. Their massive bill will open the state to mega-casinos in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Hillsborough Counties. A Florida Senate committee already snuck in a preliminary vote yesterday; seven voted in favor and three voted against. The entire Legislature will take up the landmark proposal during the 60-day session that begins today.
The state would create a new Gaming Control Czar to administer and license the casino resorts and regulate the parimutuels and card rooms.
“Our goal is a significant reduction in gaming,” Rep. Fresen said.
Here in Florida we have hundreds of ways to extract a tax on people who can’t do math, from arbitrage betting, bingo parlors (and church basements), carnival games, casinos, dog and horse tracks and other parimutuels, electronic “gaming,” the Florida Lottery itself with Lotto, MegaMoney, PowerBall, and Wheel of Fortune (the state even has email and text “alerts,” smartphone apps, podcasts, and an RSS feed), sports betting, Texas hold’em tournies, and wee wee wee all the way home.
“Our goal is a significant reduction in gaming,” Rep. Fresen said.
I want some of what he’s smoking.
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Or prostitutes.
In Louisiana there are lots of casinos that are run by the Indians. No, I don’t mean the Calcutta kind or the ones in Cleveland, Ohio. I mean the kind who used to wear feathers in their headbands and who threw spears and shot arrows at settlers and terrorized transplanted European prairie dwellers.
One day I rode with a bus load of day gamblers to one of the major casinos located in Kinder Louisiana. The bus cost $5 round trip, and it picked us up at five ayem and promised to get us back home around mindnight.
When we loaded that night to come home I learned that some people had won a few bucks, but most had lost anywhere up to a hundred or so; but they all had a good time at the free buffet and half-price bar. And they left happy — even after having been divested of more than the food or drink would have cost. Everyone agreed that it was a good day’s outting. Some even got laid.
One thing I noticed was there were no Indians of any variety walking around. No tee-pees, no Navajo blankets, no peace pipes to bury and no tomahawks to smoke — or wotever the traditional ceremony is. Just watchful caucasian men with larger than normal suit coats that I’m sure housed a big gun underneath.
Me, I broke about even, and I never went back.
— George