Local governments are also in dire need of funds to continue serving their services to the community. Many local economies are heavily rooted in gambling such as horse tracks, but such a small array of betting games has recently put strain on maintaining these business models and keeping people employed. In a region in West Virginia 51% said they supported dealer style games in a race track. The reason for voting for this measure is because if they don’t large numbers of jobs will be lost. In Massachusetts four to five thousand employees would be unemployed due to lack of revenue in racetracks. Local v.f.w.'s, fire, and police stations are also looking for a piece of the gambling pie to make up for lack of local funding for new equipment and to pay employees. Plus, local communities are also looking for ways to increase pay of teachers in their educational systems. If a law in Massachusetts legalizing the use of more slot machines, "every city and town in Massachusetts would benefit from direct local aid" (Clancy, Yuntis).

The most important part of gambling is the recreational value that Americans obtain from playing these games. If someone wants to play a slot machine why should the government be there to stop them? They shouldn’t have to travel outrageous lengths just to play some card games. According to a recent survey, "81% of Americans said that gambling was an acceptable activity" ( Jonathan Last). Not only that but like stated above 26% of all gaming aged adults traveled to casinos last year. Since 1993 to 2004 there has been a huge surge in the popularity of gambling due to shows on TV as evident in the revenue increase of casinos from 11.2 billion to 27 billion. To show how vastly attached to gambling our culture has come a, "nominee to the Supreme Court has as the apex of her resume a stint as the head as the Texas Lottery Commission" ( Jonathan Last). If you walk down any gaming aisle you will notice that a very large section is poker chips and gambling supplies. Gambling touches almost every aspect of recreation including our sports. In 2003 fantasy series had over 15.2 million participants, with an almost 1.8 billion dollar franchise behind it.

Some of you might admit that gambling causes some good, but also causes addiction and feeds off those who are addicted. This could not be farther from the truth. According to the Washington Post, three percent of gaming aged adults will become pathologically addicted. In that same article it also says that "teens with a gambling problem were more likely to engage in risky behavior such as unsafe sex, binge drinking, and skipping school. This shows that they are in a way predisposed to addictive things and need help. By legalizing gambling the state will have increased money to spend on not only combating gambling addictions, but all types of addiction. Since the average American understands the odds behind gambling, most won't even have a problem with gambling. This is also presented in the article when Larry McShane says about, "Eighty percent of kids who gamble, there will be no impact on there lives." Those who advocate that the easy access to gambling will increase kids gambling, then I say take closer care of your kids and what there spending money on.

Others, however, will argue that this is a bad economic setup just to solve this problem. This too is false logic. According to my economics class fifty percent of the amount paid in goes into prizes, twelve percent goes directly into overhead, and thirty eight percent goes to state and local taxes. First the fifty percent gets taxed as income as well as will be reinvested into the economy by the consumer who won. The thirty eight percent also obviously isn't ineffective because it goes directly to the state as revenue which is the primary purpose of making it legal. The remaining twelve percent is a little more complicated. It goes to pay employees, build new infrastructure or sometimes sits in the bank. The first one as you can tell is also not an economic problem; the second also is not a problem because that is a growing service business providing entertainment and also getting taxed on profits. The money is also taxed and helps our banking industry. The American tax code is very efficient and wherever the money goes it will be taxed at all stages and help some form of the economy.

Next I would like to show you an overall example of the positive effects of gambling in an area, but also disprove the assumption that crime is increased through gambling. Atlantic City legalized gambling in 1976 in order to combat problems of poverty and crime. According to the New York Times, "Atlantic City's casinos, which have an annual payroll of more than $1 billion, had increased local property values to more than $6 billion from $319 million since casino gambling was established in New Jersey in 1976." Through this they have reached there goal of lessening poverty, crime has been also lowered significantly. According to the American Gaming Association, "the crime rate in Atlantic City is nearly 50 percent lower today than it was before casinos opened". The article stated that the FBI's Uniform Crime Report had only one year of an increase in crime since 1988.