The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation says Gov. Deval Patrick is being too optimistic about how much revenue his casino plan would generate. How optimistic? Boston Globe reporter Matt Viser writes:
Patrick has proposed using half of the $400 million in annual proceeds to provide income tax credits of an average of $200 to nearly 1 million state residents whose local property tax bills are 2.5 percent or more of their annual income. The other half would be spent on improving roads and bridges.
But based on Patrick’s other plans for spending the casino revenues, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation projects that only between $115 million and $133.8 million would be available for property tax relief — not $200 million.
Likewise, the foundation said, the $200 million that Patrick expects to be available for transportation improvements also would not fully materialize.
As the foundation notes, other states are not going to sit still and let Massachusetts reap all the ill-gotten gains for itself. You can be sure that Connecticut will do something to hold on to its regional monopoly. And New Hampshire is likely to react as well, as state Sen. Susan Tucker, D-Andover, warned at a recent MassINC forum.
At least casino visitors won’t get lung cancer. David Kibbe explains.
Disclosure: I’ll be the guest speaker at a fundraising event on Nov. 15 for Casinofacts.org, the leading anti-casino organization in Middleborough. The event will be held at the Fireside Grille, and will get under way at 6:30 p.m.
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Ask any bar owner what banning smoking will do to business. What’s next, no fried food? Vegan platters? Talk about a non-starter..
Here’s a novel concept: let’s have road and bridge improvements paid for by the people who use them!Also, the Commonwealth has said that it won’t allow casino gambling to reduce lottery revenues. This is doubly ironic. State lotteries were created to curb illegal numbers games (and to get some revenue). From the anti-illegal gambling policy perspective, there should be nothing wrong with lottery play being siphoned off by other legal gambling.The consequence of the lottery and neighboring states efforts to retain customers: the casinos will, for the most part, only succeed to the extent that they can create new gamblers.Massachusetts can’t win it if you’re not in it.