Attorney General Andrew Bailey would have Missourians believe those thousands of illegal gaming machines all over the state are akin to harmless kids’ arcade games, where you drop in a quarter and try to scoop up a stuffed toy with a hook.
Give us a break.
The reason grownups (and, inevitably, some kids) are plugging money into these gaming machines is for the random chance to win more money back. That’s called gambling, and it’s illegal when it isn’t taxed and regulated by the state.
This isn’t that complicated: the state’s top legal official, who has accepted thousands of campaign dollars from sources connected to these illegal gaming machines, is outright refusing to rein them in. Bailey’s spineless demurring on the issue — it’s “complex,” he recently told an interviewer — is especially inconsistent for someone who had no qualms about sticking his official nose into the personal medical decisions of transgender citizens.
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Whether to even allow legalized gambling was a heated debate in Missouri for many years, but that debate is long over. For better or worse, state-sanctioned gambling is here to stay. The tradeoff society has made is to ensure that it serves the public by providing significant funding for education, via gambling taxes, and that the societal ills gambling can bring are mitigated by strong state oversight.
That regulation ensures the games aren’t allowed to spread unrestricted throughout the state, that they’re fairly run, that kids aren’t playing them and that services for compulsive gamblers are available, funded by fees from the casinos themselves.
But none of that happens — not the tax income, not the regulatory safety nets — in regard to the thousands of unlicensed video gaming machines that have been set up at gas stations and other venues around Missouri.
They look like electronic slot machines, but the companies have come up with an ingenious way to claim they don’t constitute game-of-chance gambling: The player has an opportunity to see if each play will be a winner before committing money to it. But the catch is that players can’t see the outcome of the play after that. And the only way to know if they will eventually win more than they put in is to accept even a losing outcome of the play in front of them.
If that sounds like a complicated explanation of why this actually is gambling, here’s much simpler one: Players all over Missouri aren’t plugging their quarters into these machines just for “entertainment.” They actually can win money — though because of the lack of regulation, they can get ripped off, too, with no recourse.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reports, the Missouri Gaming Commission has fielded complaints from players who claim the host businesses of the unlicensed machines have refused to honor winnings of as high as $3,000. There have also been reports of children using the machines.
Meanwhile, the finite amount of gambling revenue out there is being siphoned off from regulated, taxpaying casinos — which is to say, away from Missouri schools — and into the pockets of the unregulated machines’ owners. Much of it is finding its way from there into the political coffers of Bailey and other state politicians.
As has been previously reported, Bailey has accepted more than $25,000 in political donations from sources traceable to the unregulated gaming industry. Bailey himself has effectively acknowledged this conflict of interest by recusing his office from litigation between the machines’ owners and the state, necessitating the contracting of private legal counsel at taxpayers’ (further) expense.
No wonder Bailey — who has brought the full weight of his office to bear in opposing abortion, transgender rights and reasonable gun restrictions — vacillated all over the place last week with McGraw Milhaven on KTRS (550-AM) regarding these illegal machines.
“Not all the machines are the same,” he said. “It’s impossible to make a blanket determination … It’s complex.”
No, it isn’t.