Perhaps you’re wondering what your state government is for, what it's doing right now, and what it wants. Do you really need, and can you really afford, a governor as well as a president, a state national guard as well as the national armed forces, a state education department as well as the national one, a state senator, as well as John Fetterman (or whomever you may be dealing with and be represented by, wherever you are)? Why, you may be asking yourself, are they subjecting me to so many redundant layers of faux-competent authority and making me pay for it all under corresponding layers of taxation?
More to the point, you may be asking whether we, the citizens of our state, can really afford two of everything like this. Isn't it a violation of basic principles of fiscal frugality? Are we really that rich? Well, believe me, your governor and state senator have been thinking about this too, for one thing because their salaries and benefits packages are funded out of state revenue. For decades, state officials have wondered how they could maintain a steady stream of cash money that would be under their own control. You can only jack up the sales tax so high before people move to Louisiana.
Happily, there’s a solution, taken up in a particularly inspiring way in my own state of Pennsylvania: gambling. we live in the gambling era, during which ads by Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx never cease, even while Jamie's in rehab. But in this era, I think it's fair to say, everyone who watches ESPN, or who goes on the internet, is going to end up in rehab anyway. Jamie's just showing all of us the way to promote what kills us.
The state income tax in Pennsylvania generated about $17.9 billion in state revenue for the '23-'24 fiscal year. Total "gaming revenue" (generated from slots, casinos, and horse racing) amounted to $6 billion, while the state lottery generated around $5 billion. As the gambling increases, which it has dramatically, the state is liable within a few years to be generating more revenue from gambling than through any (other) form of taxation. If you removed the gambling revenues from the state budget, which is constitutionally mandated to be balanced, the state would, right now, be broke beyond the point of bankruptcy.
And if you removed liquor and tobacco revenues as well, the government of the state of Pennsylvania couldn’t persist, even in vestigial form. So we've resolved the mystery of what the state government of Pennsylvania is for: it's for the relentless promotion of vice. Ironically enough, the state motto of Pennsylvania, appearing on its flag, is "Virtue, Liberty, and Independence." This is as anachronistic as the inclusion of the Confederate battle flag in the state flag of Mississippi. The state government of Pennsylvania is dedicated all day every day to Vice, Compulsion, and Dependence.
Here in PA, there are casinos springing up all over, including in small towns such as Shippensburg. Every convenience store now features slot machines and a dead-eyed group of old men pulling levers. You can't switch on the local news without being bombarded by gambling promotions. Probably the most familiar figure in the state, more than the gambling-dependent governor Josh Shapiro, is Gus the groundhog, CGI spokesman for the PA lottery. For the state of PA not only skims the money off all the casinos—just as though it was the Cosa Nostra—it’s also your numbers runner.
But it has promotional resources that the neighborhood numbers racket in Philly in 1963 never had: it blankets all media at once; the PA lottery is in my living room, on the phone in my pocket, on half the billboards in the state. They want me gambling. More to the point, they need me to gamble. They benefit when I gamble. They urge me to gamble more and more, and they provide more and more outlets for gambling, make it harder and harder to avoid. Certainly, no American can fail to think about gambling every day now; it's like we're being attacked in all media at once, as well as in physical space in every store and along every road. By our own governments, among others.
However, there’s one tremendous drawback to funding the government by vice: it has bad social consequences. That in itself evidently wouldn't concern our elected leaders, but "bad" means "expensive." People lose their jobs, their families, their homes, their shirts, and end up on welfare and food stamps, which costs money. They commit suicide and have to be cremated or buried at state expense.
Fortunately, this in itself represents a revenue opportunity for the state government, which already operates a number of rehab centers. If the state of PA can eliminate all non-state providers of recovery services with regard to the products the state of PA sells, it can charge insurance companies for rehabbing the millions of problem gamblers it’s producing. After we complete our rehab, we the people will be eligible to start gambling again. It’ll be hard to avoid, with the relentless promotion.
In this way, the state of PA can become completely self-sustaining: producing vast revenues by converting citizens into addicted gamblers, then rehabbing them for big insurance bucks, then promoting gambling at them relentlessly once more. And that is what state governments are for!
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell