SPRINGFIELD – A professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said that any benefits the state might gain from gambling expansion will be small compared to the social and financial costs it will incur.
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SPRINGFIELD – A professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said that any benefits the state might gain from gambling expansion will be small compared to the social and financial costs it will incur.
Proponents of the new law have said it will bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s coffers from licensing fees alone. It will also bring jobs and tax revenue from gambling profits.
John Kindt, professor emeritus of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the costs associated with the fallout from problem gamblers will far outweigh those benefits.
“The American Psychiatric Association has delineated gambling as the first behavioral addiction and with the expansion of gambling, that’s called the acceptability factor, and you add that to the accessibility factor – we now have slot machines electronic gambling basically on every other street corner – and those two factors together are going to increase the number of addicted gamblers, particularly among kids,” Kindt said.
“Children, high schoolers, college-age young adults – they’re showing double the gambling addiction rate of the older generation because they’re electronically savvy,” he said. “Actually, we’re seeing it already – a large increase in the number of addicted gamblers particularly among youth, and each new addicted gambler costs society between $13,000 and about $65,000 per year in added social costs.”
Kindt said about 10 percent of gamblers develop problems and around 3 percent become addicted. Problem behaviors associated with that addiction can range from child neglect to bankruptcies to lost work time and more.
Kindt, who has testified before the state legislature, said research has shown that people who live near gambling facilities spend 10 percent less on food and 25 percent less on clothing, and 37 percent have tapped into their children’s bank accounts, education funds and medical accounts in order to gamble.
Addicted gamblers who do not find their way into Gamblers Anonymous, he said, either commit suicide or wind up incarcerated because they steal in order to gamble. Kindt added that statistics of gamblers in jail are hard to come by, but the habit is responsible for convictions for such crimes as theft, fraud and embezzlement.
