"When the path ahead forks, take the hard road," an old saying holds.
Take the tough road. Take the more difficult road.
Because it's usually the right road.
And that's true with choices in ethics and public policy as well as life.
Minnesota now is at such a fork in the road. "Despite a party platform that opposes expanded gambling in Minnesota, high-level Republicans are leading on gambling bills that would raise revenue without raising taxes," the Star Tribune reported Wednesday.
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"Raise revenue without raising taxes." The phrase is the giveaway, and it's exactly the reason the Legislature should reject the gambling proposals.
For gambling in this context is an obvious dodge. It's just a way of avoiding the hard road -- the road that demands tax hikes and spending cuts; the road on which both Republicans and Democrats would anger their core constituencies.
The road that has been the urgent and obvious choice for Minnesota ever since the state's fiscal crisis began years ago.
Gambling is a sad substitute for lots of reasons. For one thing, it winds up amounting to a regressive tax on the poor. "Here's the scandal," wrote Mark Lange in the Christian Science Monitor in 2007.
"In 1999, the bipartisan National Gambling Impact Commission found that 80 percent of gambling revenue comes from households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year.
"More remarkably, players with annual incomes of less than $10,000 spent almost three times as much on gambling ... as those with incomes of more than $50,000.
"With the aggressive encouragement of state governments, U.S. gamblers -- most of them scraping by on limited incomes -- had to lose $84 billion last year in casinos and lotteries for the states to raise $24 billion in new revenues."
Minnesota can and should do better.
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Moreover, those states that depend heavily on gambling have lived to regret it. Just as Minnesota considers going all-in on gambling, Nevada is trying to back away: "With Las Vegas' economy among the worst in the world and studies urging more be done to help future growth, the state's political leaders are holding a conference before the Nevada Legislature convenes to discuss diversifying the economy," the Las Vegas Sun reported earlier this year.
The "worst in the world" ranking grows from staggering unemployment and foreclosure rates. At least 2/3 of home mortgage holders in Nevada owe more on their loans than their home is worth, according to the Brookings Institution.
As a former Nevada governor has said, "The lesson from the past 20 years is clear: Our revenue system is broken because it has relied on regressive and unstable (gambling) taxes."
Minnesota can do better than that, too.
Then there's what might be the most important reason of all: the fact that Minnesota's Indian reservations already depend on gambling revenue. Forty thousand Minnesotans -- many of them in the state's poorest counties -- work at tribal gaming jobs, MinnPost.com reported.
Even if expanded gambling benefitted the state treasury, it would do so at the tribal workers' expense. That's a trade-off the state should avoid.
The hard road is the right road; and in Minnesota, the hard road leads Democrats and Republicans to a place where they can meet in the middle. That means shaking hands over a straightforward agreement that cuts spending, raises taxes -- and fixes the state's structural deficit once and for all.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
