A wager we can't win

The nation's woeful economy has picked at least one winner — gambling — as states look at ways to increase their revenues. The money might be tempting, but the social costs say that legalized gambling can be a sucker's bet.

Those costs frequently include crime, prostitution, bankruptcy and gambling addiction. Legalized-gambling advocates, like state Sen. Robert Ford, point to the benefits that can be achieved with the additional revenue to the state, as well as jobs.

"Gambling," the Charleston Democrat says, is "no blight on society." Sen. Ford said he supports legalized gambling, in part, because of the social programs its revenues can sustain. Using that logic, he has described legalizing gambling as the Christian thing to do.

Sen. Ford correctly points out that the state already has legalized gambling in the form of a state lottery. We'd say that the lottery shouldn't be the start of a slippery slope.

Lottery revenues pay mainly for college scholarships, and the Lottery's popularity among the parents who have benefitted from its largesse probably means it will never go away.

The lottery's customers are typically those of limited means, who patronize it with money that could be used for better purposes, such as living expenses. Daunting lottery odds mean that big winners are very few and far between.

No question, the existence of the lottery serves as an inducement to other forms of legalized gambling. And the poor economy makes it even more attractive to fund public programs that have been decimated by budget cuts — $1 billion so far in South Carolina. As Baylor University's Earl Grinols, an economics professor whose academic specialty is gambling, told The Associated Press, "From the gambling industry's point of view, this is their big chance."

South Carolinians, and their legislators, should recall the brief heyday of video poker in the state. While it generated substantial revenue to the state, video poker was found to be a particularly pernicious form of gambling, mainly because of the level of gambling addiction that it frequently produced. The Legislature finally pulled the plug with a 1999 bill that outlawed it in 2000.

As tough as times are, South Carolina shouldn't look to legalized gambling as a jackpot for the state and its government. Experience elsewhere has shown that once here, it would never go away. For states, gambling is addictive, too.