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Slate featured an article Monday morning suggesting that casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson does not have enough money to stop Internet gambling.
Adelson has launched a campaign to quash efforts to legalize Web gambling at both the federal and state level. As one of the GOP’s biggest donors, he’s also got some Republicans on board to introduce legislation prohibiting such activity.
Slate’s Nicholas Kusnetz explains the dilemma where Adelson is concerned:
All together, these interest groups spent $8.2 million lobbying the federal government on Internet gambling last year, according to the trade publisher GamblingCompliance, and millions more in state capitals from Trenton to Sacramento. And while Washington has drawn much of the recent attention, the real action may come in the states. New Jersey, Nevada, and Delaware have already legalized online gambling, and lawmakers are debating the issue in seven other states right now.
In these capitals, the promise of gambling profits is mixing with a need to plug budget gaps. Lawmakers face pressure to boost revenues, while proponents of online gambling are dangling the issue as a pain-free “voluntary tax.” And so other states seem sure to follow—and there may be little that Sheldon Adelson or anyone else can do about that.
Kusnetz’s notes that, as more states legalize online gambling, it will become especially difficult to ban the activity at the federal level.
- Ace King, Gambling911.com
