Category Archives: economy

Liars Figure

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—especially when they don’t like the truth that figures tell.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported job growth figures well under those our president had been bragging about or boasting did not, in fact, materialize, he killed the messenger, another indication that he cannot tolerate people who tell the truth.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 73,000 jobs had been created nationally in July, a third month that the numbers came up short of what had been promoted or predicted.  The department, as it has done at times in the past, adjusted previously-announced figures for May and June substantially lower than originally reported. And our President—with no evidence the bureau was not being accurate with the adjustment—fired the director.

Trump hasn’t liked Director Erika McEntarfer anyway and has accused her of faking employment numbers last year to make Kamala Harris look good. He claims the July job figures are the latest thing “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”  He says he will hire someone “much more competent and qualified” to take McEntarfer’s place.

We wonder which “more competent and qualified” FOX news anchor he will pick to replace McEntarfer, who has a doctorate in economics from Virginia Tech and was an economist in the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies during Trump’s first term. Before that, she worked in the Treasury Department Office of Tax Policy. During the Biden presidency she was with the Council of Economic Advisors as a senior economist. The Republican-controlled Senate showed its confidence in her with a confirmation vote of 86-8 for  directorship in early 2024.

What seemed to pull Trump’s cork was that  revision downward of numbers from May and June and a paltry 73,000 new jobs reported in July. The original report for May calculated only 19,000 new jobs were created. The original report for June calculated 144,000 new jobs but was revised downward by ninety percent to only 14,000.  The new three-month total is 106,000, well below the original report just for June.

The outlook for much improvement is gloomy.  Coresight Research forecasts 15,000 stores will close this year. That’s added to the 7,325 closed last year.

From various sources we have put together a list of store chains shutting down big parts of their holdings:

Walgreens 500 this year, 1200 by end of 2027.

Advanced auto Parts 727 by mid-year.

Macy’s 150 stores through 2026.

Family Dollar  370 this year (600 last year)

CVS  300 stores already closed.

Big Lots  500-700

Joann Fabrics  all stores

Forever 21 all locations

Rite Aid  200 in fourteen states

Denny’s Restaurants 100 this year; 50 last year

Red Robin  70

Foot Locker  More than 400 by 2026

Dollar Tree  30

7-11  440 (out of more than 13,000 locations)

And none of those figures look at the jobs that are lost because workers are shipped off to some mysterious location and there hasn’t been time for Medicaid recipients to replace them in the face of threats to take away their benefits if they don’t work.

Political cowards do not accept bad news and often have a tendency to look for scapegoats rather than flaws in their own policies.  Leaders look for ways to turn bad news around. Cowards kill messengers. Leaders do not fear truth to power; they welcome its challenges to be better.

Trump claims the national economy is booming because of his policies. The numbers say otherwise. His solution is to fire someone who looks at the numbers and tells us truths he doesn’t want us to hear—.

—as is the case with Federal Reserve Chief Jerome Powell, who won’t embrace the rosy picture Trump paints of the economy. He lies awake at night—-maybe we should put some punctuation in there so it more accurately reads, “He lies, awake at night”—because he lives in his own world where truth is kept under mental lock and key, and he cooks up new insults and threats to throw at those who have the courage to stand up to him.

When will this country, particularly those who have so easily shrunk from their responsibilities to the people at large, reach a tipping point with him?

 

Here We Go Again

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We’ve seen this scenario played out before. Republicans cut some taxes and the economy goes into the toilet soon after with the state having reduced its ability to fund programs that people rely on during economic downturns, especially lower-income Missourians.

The national economy isn’t in the toilet (yet, perhaps), but Congress has approved President Trump’s budget that will harm thousands of Missourians.  At the same time, Governor Kehoe is thinking about signing the bill eliminating some taxes that will produce revenues.

He already has vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget approved by the legislature, citing concerns about state finances in the fiscal year that is  newly underway.

We must be missing something. This doesn’t seem to add up to us. On one hand, there is concern that the state can afford the things the legislature approved and on the other hand there’s—

Wait a minute.

Aren’t we on the same hand?

Finger one: Cut the budget because of uncertainty of state finances, much of it caused by federal cuts in some important programs.

Finger two: Cut Missouri taxes to reduce total revenues even more?

One estimate is that the tax cuts reduce program funding by about a half-billion dollars at a time when not-so-beautiful bill in Washington eliminates a lot of federal money coming here.

To be sure, there are some good things in the bill he plans to sign.  A capital gains tax reduction will be welcomed by many who have capital gains but that’s one reason the liberal-leaning Missouri Budget Project isn’t a fan of the bill.   The MBP says five percent of Missouri taxpayers will get eighty percent of the benefits.

But it’s not all for the high-rollers. The Circuit Breaker property tax program will increase the income levels of people eligible for it, a change that will affect almost 200,000 households. The state sales tax is being lifted for diapers and women’s hygiene products. And there are some other things the MBP admits are badly-needed.

The conventional Republican wisdom is that if you reduce taxes, the infusion of those moneys into the general economy will generate more revenues to offset the taxes. We can’t say that we have noticed significant improvements in the economy when the legislature reduces Missourians’ taxes.

We are in sympathy with the stated reasons for lowering these taxes but we wonder if freezes are more protective of the overall well-being of state services than cuts at this time.

For more than fifty years we have listened to all kinds of people complain about the lack of money for schools, health and mental health, prisons, law enforcement, housing, nutrition and a host of other issues.  This scenario is kind of like the old saying, “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” except the talk about taxes also includes doing something about them.

Sometimes though, it is best to heed the phrase-altered advice, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

To be honest, we admit having no grasp of the subtlety of economics that one probably needs to understand the rationale for these cuts.  We only took one economics course in college. Everything else we know about the economy is reflected in our utility bills and grocery prices. And in our taxes.

Jim Mathewson, who served in the legislature from Sedalia and was the President Pro Tem of the Senate for eight years, a record that will never be broken in this unfortunate era of term limits, said several times, “People don’t remember that you cut their taxes. But they sure remember when you raise them.”

It’s a nice bill today but the people who remember it are the ones who won’t benefit, especially those hit with the federal cuts.  One thing we’ll watch is to see whether there’s a political fallout in state politics that will be anywhere the fallout being predicted at the national level.

 

Cartoon Man/Man as Cartoon

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Editorial cartoonists occupy a unique position in American journalism.  They can comfort. They can interpret. They can inform. They can provoke.

They can capture a moment in our national existence in a way that is memorable. They can show in their work things we mortals grasp for words to express.  Steve Burns, a Pulitzer-Prize winning children’s book author, works for the San Diego Union Tribune.

A few days ago, he captured an image of the American economy that is not what our president promised in his campaign it would be. “Stocks Down,” he called it.

It’s the most creative illustration I have seen of our president and the times he has brought down upon us.

Burns’ cartoons are syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate.

We hope he can do another portrait someday of our president that reverses the lines, not because we want him to succeed but because we want our nation to prosper no matter what he eventually does to it.

Hats off to Steve Burns who uniquely captures this moment for our nation.

(Image credit: Creators Syndicate March 14, 2025)

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Notes from a Quiet Street

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(Comments on affairs of our world that do not reach the umbrage level necessary to result in a full blog).

This is sooooo bureaucratic—from someone who wants to reduce the bureaucracy.

President Trump has set up a Department of Government Efficiency.  DOGE to those who speak Bureaucratic.

Think about that for a minute.  Trump’s first step in making major cuts to the federal bureaucracy is to establish a new bureaucracy.  We’ll be watching to see how many employees it takes to be efficient.

It’s not really a “department” that is part of the cabinet. So far it’s just two rich guys who’ve never been inside government, hired by a third billionaire.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the two guys.

We will watch to see if adjusting the tax code for themselves is as important as axing programs for those farther down the economic ladder.

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Many of us are surprised to learn that Canada is such an evil country, right up there with Mexico.  One of the reasons the incoming president has given for big tariffs being put on products from those two countries is that they facilitate the entrance of Fentanyl into this country.

It’s always easy to do tariffs.  Let’s see what the administration’s plan is to reduce consumption of the drug in this country. Money follows the consumption of a product, whether it’s fentanyl, superhero trading cards, gold tennis shoes, allegedly fancy watches, or even red caps.  Right?

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And, of course, making Canada our 51st state—-hear that, Texas and Alaska, who will be dwarfed by this new state—will solve all that problem.

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How about making Panama our 52nd state?

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And maybe we can revive talks about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland, or just buying Greenland, too, and keeping Puerto Rico!!

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How much will the Billionaire Boys have to cut out of the budget to pay for that little shopping spree by someone who is unlikely to have ever bought a ten-dollar shirt at Sam’s club?

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Lt. Governor-elect Dave Wasinger has hired Katie Ashcroft as his Chief of Staff.  She needed the job as she looks toward being the sole breadwinner for the family when her spouse gets laid off   in January.

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Wasinger is the first person who to preside over the Missouri Senate as the Senate President (one of the roles of the Lt. Governor) with no experience in elective office at any level since Kansas City lawyer and Democratic Party activist Hillary Busch, who served from 1961-65 under Governor John Dalton.

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It is such a relief to open our mail at this time of year and hearing from people who have a personal relationship with us to donate more than $19 a month—or to dispense with parts of my children’s inheritance.

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But then again, we’re not getting automated phone calls from people wanting to counsel us about Medicare enrollment.

In the space of 24 hours our caller-ID told us we had gotten calls from Elgin, Missouri; Laddonia, Benton, Lewistown, and Jefferson City. Most left no messages but a few times when we answered and a human was on the other end, we asked, “Where are you located?”  One person would only say, ”I’m calling from a remote location.”

I thought we were on the Attorney General’s no-call list.  I would call him to ask, but he’s too busy working on national issues, probably, to talk about why it doesn’t seem to work very well.

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One day last year, our caller ID said the call was coming from our number.

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It oughta be illegal.

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It’s been so nice not wrapping a bunch of presents and not digging out all of the Christmas decorations and planning a big meal for the extended family.  Instead of wrapping things, we’re packing things.  We’ve given ourselves a great big present—a new mailing address.

But the blog is not moving.  It’s going to stay right here.

(image credit: Executioner—Reddit)

 

Let the Ethnic Cleansing Begin—Part Two

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We painted a rather pessimistic view in our last entry of our retread President’s plans for the largest deportation effort in our history. We looked at a Mother Jones article from a few months back that tried to gauge what the difficulties would be if he carries through with his plan.

The article displayed concerns about grave economic consequences of deporting 11-million people. Most of the adults in the group would be forced to leave their jobs behind, producing a crisis in the chicken plucking, roofing, and agricultural industries.

Here’s how to deal with this:

During his campaign, the incoming President asserted that these brown people from the south and the (probably) predominantly white people form the north—all of those thieves, killers, rapists, robbers, insane people, and major drug carriers, you know—were taking jobs away from Americans. Late in the campaign, speaking to a special group, he emphasized that these jobs were “Black jobs.”

You might remember from his June debate: “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

Hispanics taking Hispanic jobs?   We’ll let him try to make that logical some other time, which might be one of the few times he has done that.  But what about “Black jobs?”

If I were an African-American, I might take great offense at his assumption that there are certain jobs set aside for Black people. I thought our civilized America had pretty well gotten beyond that, but maybe he was too busy bankrupting his latest business venture to notice.

Incidentally, did he ever check the citizenship status of the cleaning staff at his hotels, clubs, and other properties? And what color were those jobs?

Well, not to get toooooo snarky—

The Hispanic people that he seems to have a hate/love relationship with do the farming, roofing, hotel cleaning, and healthcare jobs that include, as one source put it in our last entry, “emptying bedpans.” But if we export the Hispanics despite them having “Hispanic jobs,” then Black people seem to be the correct substitute, especially since those folks took black jobs to begin with.

But before we jettison all of these brown rapists, drug smugglers, etc., we can make them build the wall on our southern border that Mexico was supposed to pay us for building. We’re still waiting to hear that the check has cleared.

NBC had a story this summer reporting that Black workers often are overrepresented in government and health care work. There are eight Fortune 500 companies already headed by black executives, and Black people cause a problem for this scheme elsewhere. Under the first Trump administration, black unemployment dropped to 5.3%–in September 2019.  Under Joe Biden, it dropped to 4.8% in April 2023.

But that’s good news because the Army and the National Guard won’t have to round up a real big bunch of people to fill vacancies in Black people’s Black jobs. That’s good news because he won’t have enough federal military or state national guard units to round up all of the Black people who will be told to fill in for the rounded-up Hispanics.  Federal law tends to oppose that sort of thing anyway—-although the Trump Supreme Court might refine that provision.

Oh, wait! We DO have enough troops to do all of this. We just bring home soldiers helping protect our NATO allies and our sailors whose ships are protecting Israel from Iranian rocket attacks, and sailors from the ships protecting Taiwan, and troops keeping peace or holding enemies at bay in other places.  He doesn’t seem to think many of them belong out there anyway, so that’s not an employment gap he needs to worry about filling.

But then, who will replace all the Black people who are going to replace the Brown people thrown out of the country?

The solution is too easy.

Round up all the homeless people and make them fill in for all the Black folks who will regain all the jobs the brown people took away from the black people who will get their jobs back when we get rid of the Hispanic people who risked everything to come to this country to get jobs, many of whom sent some of their earnings back to other people in their home countries .

Now, all of those people who sent money home from America will be no longer sending money back home that helps their national economies. Instead, they will become a burden to those counties that we consider our allies.

Getting back to the homeless—

There are studies that show many of the homeless have mental problems but they can’t be treated because Ronald Reagan killed President Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act that continued funding federal community mental health centers. In a matter of weeks after he took office, Reagan changed things to give states block grants which haven’t made up for the loss of the Carter program. So we have a lot of mentally-ill homeless people among us and it’s easier to complain about them than do something about their problems.

But if we can take these folks, even those with mental health issues, round them up, get them off the streets and then distribute them out for mental health care duties now handled by Hispanic and Black people, everything’s fine.

Elon Musk wants to slash government spending by billions of dollars so don’t look for any mental health help for the homeless folks that will be rounded up to complete this restructuring of our economy.  The buck has to stop somewhere.

But who is going to help those who have taken the remaining job openings that have trickled down after the Hispanic deportations?

Simple.

Our retread President tells all those countries for which he wants to inflict tariffs that if the armies in those other countries round up enough of their people and make them emigrate to the United States, we won’t have a problem.  Unfortunately, our immigration people might be so busy getting people out of the country that they won’t have time to check the legality of those coming in.

But there it is.  All the bases are covered.  America will be great again.

No charge.  No awards expected.

A lingering issue remains, though.  Will the Army and the National Guard be committed equally to rounding up Canadians, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Swedes—among others—who probably are in this country illegally, too?

And then once we’ve got all of immigrants out of the country, who’s going to protect the rest of us from the Wampanoags, whose lands were taken by the Pilgrims who came here seeking religious liberty for themselves but not for Baptists and other unacceptable people who they considered the equivalents of our rapists, drug smugglers, criminals and crazy people, when the Wampanoags and other nations demand the interlopers get out of places such as Mar-a-Lago?

Let the Ethnic  Cleansing Begin—Part One 

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Our retread President has promised that deportation of 11-millon undocumented aliens will be started on his first day in office. A number of economists or economy-watchers say the consequences could be severe. But that is immaterial to the incoming Commander/Demander in Chief of our country.  Others have raised serious humanitarian questions about the policy. But nobody has ever accused our incoming President of having any humanitarian interests except for his own, which are closely tied to his personal wealth.

Today we are going to start describing a plan that will mitigate any economic or diplomatic damage resulting from this deportation efforts. We expect no recognition from the incoming administration for these helpful ideas. However, if an invitation were extended to attend the State of the Union speech during which it would be announced that our necks soon will be decorated with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, we would not object.  Much. We are offering this advice at no cost, something that will please Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world who seems to have a plan to reduce government spending no matter what the cost.

Some might find this plan slightly off-the-wall. Or entirely so. But somebody has to provide some insight into how to deal with this issue and your faithful scribe will jump into the breach.

Mother Jones magazine, which some people dismiss as a liberal rag, took a hard look at Trump’s proposal a few months ago.  The incoming president has blamed foreign drug cartels and gangs have “invaded” the United States and have established a foothold at an apartment complex in Colorado, a claim contested and/or debunked by the town mayor and residents of the apartment complex in much the same way that leaders of a town in Ohio deny there’s any cat-eating going on there. Regardless, the “invasion” deserves a forceful response from this country.

The incoming President also has asserted that brown people from Venezuela and other countries that have emptied their prisons and lunatic asylums are killers, rapists, fentanyl importers, and probably don’t wear clean underwear every day.

Mother Jones describes a lot of problems with 47’s plan (actually he’s the 45th person to be President. He’s the second one to have two different administrations):

The magazine  says it’s going to take 95,994 chartered flights to get the 11-million people out of the country and going to wherever they will be  unloaded.  Projected costs, spread through 20 years because you can’t do this in two weeks would be $300-Billion.

Who would profit?  Private prison companies such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group were paid $1.5 billion by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to run immigration detention centers in 2022. They’ll improve our economy by building new facilities and hiring a lot of people to guard the women and children—and men—at new lockups.  A GEO Group subsidiary, BI Incorporated, got a five-year deal to produce ankle monitors and phone tracking apps worth $2.2 billion to ICE and will do quite well making 11-million more of these shackles. CSI Aviation has a $128.3 million contract for daily transport flights that they’ll have to increase, again pumping more money back into economy.

And this business expansion will offset the loss of jobs elsewhere in our economy.

There probably will be inconsiderate and ungrateful lawyers who will sue the government if the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is used to justify the deportations.

This might be the time to invest in a critical industry: hardware and home improvement companies. All of those detention camps will require a lot of posts and poles and wire and plywood buildings for the large facilities for undesirable Canadians, Mexicans, etc. A spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association likens such camps to Soviet Gulags.

If there aren’t enough people in our regular military services who are guarding Taiwan, and South Korea and other pressure points in the globe and a decision is made not to lessen those protections, then nationalizing the National Guard is a possibility, he says. Fine and dandy but the Posse Comitatus Law forbids the National Guard from doing civilian law enforcement jobs.

Let’s face it, establishing military guard posts at every road in and out of all of our states is going to take a lot of people making sure no undocumented aliens can seek safety in a different state from their illegal homes here.

The article suggested we brace ourselves for big increases in food costs, decreases in important segments of the workforce, cuts in housing development, and cuts in some health programs.

The magazine quotes an agriculture and economics professor at the University of California-Davis who estimates food prices for hand-picked products will go up 21% because the deportations will eliminate half of the hands doing the picking. The survey also estimates 25% of the people who process our chicken, turkeys, pork, and fish are undocumented aliens. And it says we can look for a doubling of the price of milk if the people doing the milking are shipped out.

Illegal migrants are not eligible to collect Social Security. But they pay about $13-Billion a year into it. Undocumented immigrant households paid $35.1 Billion in state and federal taxes in 2022. That’s a pretty big economic hole. We’re waiting to see the plan for dealing with that.

It’s estimated about 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, two-thirds of them in providers or in supporting positions. Rebecca Shi, who heads the American Business Immigration Coalition says, “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms and empty our bedpans.”

This roundup also could affect the roofs over our heads. A study indicates one third of the crews that are whizzes at installing new roofs on our homes and businesses are potential deportees.  The construction industry already is short an estimated half-million workers.

But don’t worry.  The incoming President knows who will replace all of these workers.  If he doesn’t, we’re going to tell him in our next installment.

It might seem bizarre and crazy.  It isn’t.  It’s just the new normal.

The Ones Most Interested  

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—and the places most damaged.

We’ve had three weeks or so to digest the results of the November 5 election.  We are going to offer some insights in the next few entries.

One of the amendments we voted this month proposed something that we’ve seen before—a statewide vote to force a city or an area to allow something the people there did not want.

That was Amendment 5, which would have forced the people living and working at the Lake of the Ozarks to accept a commercial casino in their midst.  Two areas of Missouri were involved: the area where a casino is proposed and an area fearful that it would be the next place forced to accept one.

We’re talking about the Lake of the Ozarks and Branson.

It might be instructive to see their thoughts about the sports wagering amendment and the casino-placement amendment. We looked at the votes in five lake counties and in five Branson-area counties.

Both groups wanted nothing to do with either proposal, sports wagering or a casino.

The five lake counties were 57% against sports wagering, Amendment 2, that barely passed statewide with only 50.074% of the votes (as of last night), a margin so small a recount can be justified if the losers want to pay for it.  The five Branson-area counties opposed it to the tune of 60%.

Amendment 5 was the issue that was most stark in its possibilities for these two areas and the message sent by these ten counties was more than no. It pretty much amounted to a “Hell, No.” Camden County rejected the proposal 10,621-14,375. Taney County swamped it 9,875-16,071.  Sixty percent of the voters in the five lake counties rejected the casino. In the Branson area, the rejection was even greater, 61.4%.

End result: People in those ten counties don’t like sports wagering but their people can do it if they want, but they’re sure don’t want them ever to do it in a local casino.

Both of these counties have promoted their areas as family-friendly tourism destinations.  Branson was worried that a Lake of the Ozarks casino would be the precedent-setter for a casino campaign in Branson. Amendment 5 would have forced one area to accept something the voters clearly did not want, and exposed the other area to a similarly unwelcome intrusion later.

Branson had a taste of this issue twenty years ago when voters defeated a proposal to put a casino next to the White River at Rockaway Beach.

How about counties that have casinos?  Amendment 3 failed in three of them—Cape Girardeau (46.4%), Lewis (Mark Twain Casino in LaGrange—46/7%), and Cooper (Boonville 48.5%).

This time, the casino industry spent ten-million dollars on a petition effort and an election campaign for Amendment 5.  Their efforts netted them less than 48% of the statewide vote.

In St. Charles County, the home of Missouri’s most lucrative casino, Amendment 3 got only 53.4%.

The spending on the Lake of the Ozarks proposal was pocket change compared to the huge amount invested in the sports wagering amendment. It took $41 million from the two biggest internet bookies to overcome the $14 million dollar opposition campaign financed by another bookie. The victory margin was only (as of last night) 4,360 votes out of almost three million votes cast.  The certified final results will be posted after the Missouri Board of Canvassers meets on December 10.  Presidential electors meet a week later. Congress is to certify the federal results on January 6.

The casinos will get their money back pretty fast.  The host cities of the casinos will lose millions because of the support their voters game to Amendment Two.

How much will they lose?  There are two factors.  The state tax rate on gambling (table games and slot machines is 21%.  Host cities get ten percent of that amount. In the last fiscal year, ten percent of the state gaming taxes collected provided $39,711,780 to the host cities.

But sports wagering will provide ZERO money from the state gaming tax, which will be only ten percent to begin with.  The State Auditor estimates casino revenues in the first five years will be $1,044,684,612.  The states ten percent will amount to $104,467,878, all of it earmarked for higher and lower education. None of it goes to the home cities. None.

If Amendment 2 followed current law, the casinos’ own home dock cities would split an additional $10,446,788.

But it’s worse than that.  If the tax rate on sports wagering were the same as it is on other forms of gambling—and the industry has never given a consistent answer why is should not be—the home dock cities would have split an additional $21,938,377 in those first five years.

The casino industry will recover more than one-half of the money it spent on the campaign by giving their own host cities the shaft. Permanently.

I can show you the math; the casinos wouldn’t.

The manifest shortcomings in taxes can only be remedied by adoption of another amendment. A campaign that focuses on those shortcomings and either corrects or overturns Amendment 2 might be considered, given the paper-thin margin of victory for sports wagering. It would be interesting to know the reactions of city councils in the thirteen host cities if they are ever shown these numbers. I doubt the industry, its leaders, or its supporting organizations have ever given these figures to the cities

The casino industry has never been put on the defensive at the Capitol or at the ballot box.

And maybe it should be, as we will discuss in our next commentary because what could be coming will be only worse.

What Next? 

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The casino industry spent a record $41 million dollars to convince few more Missourians to vote in favor of sports wagering than voted against it—very few—out of about three million votes cast.

It will be a mistake to think the industry is satisfied with the sweetheart arrangement voters approved. The casino industry is changing rapidly, and the legislature and the voters need to be preparing for the next change in law that will benefit casinos and disadvantage the state, our schools, and their own host cities.

We don’t profess to be an expert or some kind of Casino Nostradamus, but we have been studying this industry and its proposals for several years now. It is not hard to find industry and scholarly articles pointing to a much different industry materializing in the next ten years or less. The casino industry is being altered by demographic changes. But rapidly changing technology will let the industry respond to those demographic changes.

Amendment 2 was just the first step. The policy set by Amendment 2 is likely to be the template for state policy as casinos move increasingly to remote betting on ALL gambling offerings.

We know from experience that technology often moves faster than the development of reasonable and fair regulation of it, making this a time for correction of shortcomings of the past coupled with anticipation of problems in the future. The state will be well-served by a adopting a policy of correction and anticipation, although there is considerable doubt that such a policy will be enacted a Missouri Legislature that is heavily influenced by industry pressure and largesse. Whether voters who can be wooed by absurd amounts of money spent on advertising that is low on the honesty scale would approve a policy unfriendly to the casinos is problematic.

A couple of years ago, Joey Richardson wrote for Gamblingsites.org, “(Casinos) are going to need to change what they offer and how they offer it if they want to continue to attract new customers.”

Millennials who have grown up on video games and who learned during the pandemic how to live their lives without leaving their homes already are having a major impact on the future of businesses of all kinds. Past discussions of internet sales taxes as a meager protection for brick and mortar businesses were one of the beginnings of this trend that gained momentum in the pandemic era when working from home became viable.

Hoosier Park Racing & Casino in Indiana became one of the first casinos to have a Pac-Man video slot machine, in September of 2017. Blackjack revenue for casinos is about half what it was in 1985 when it was responsible for 85% of table game revenues. Richardson noted in his article that casinos already had brought in new games to fill the gap—Caribbean stud, Three Card Poker, and Casino Holdem among them. All can be played remotely—if laws are changed to allow it.

Although Richardson doubts brick and mortar casinos will die out, Mehul Boricha, at Techrival.com has suggested virtual reality casinos could be on the way. He wrote, “Rules and regulations will always continue to influence future casinos. Various regulatory bodies come up with new and stricter policies that online casinos and games have to adopt without losing their grip on their innovation and creativity.” The new world of casino gambling that is being born in front of us will be a challenge not only to tomorrow’s legislature but to the gaming and lottery commissions that will have to regulate it. The gambling industry prefers not to make or be forced to make an investment that will allow regulatory bodies to prepare for the changes they must make to balance public responsibility with private profit.

Marketing Manager Emily Rodgers with driveresearch.com reported on August 2, 2023 that the growing preference for online or mobile app betting among three-quarters of sports bettors indicates a significant shift in the gambling industry towards digital platforms, offering convenience, accessibility, and potentially contributing to the overall increase in sports betting activity worldwide. She says convenience (78%) and easy deposits (75%) are the top reasons people prefer online/mobile sports betting. She argues that these top factors highlight the importance of user-friendly and seamless platforms in the gambling industry, factors that not only attract more bettors but also contribute to increased customer retention and engagement. She says digital channels are in the future for casino gambling, beginning with sports wagering..

Online sports betting revenue is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate (CAGR) of 10% during the next 5 years.

The introduction of AI (artificial intelligence) in sports betting will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the industry. One example is the way systems record information in digitized ledgers  known as blockchain, which is being adopted globally. Blockchain applications will help automate real-time data, expedite payments and wagers, and provide in-the-moment security and monitoring – including cryptocurrency transactions that are not allowed in Missouri, yet.

The sports betting marketplace grew ten-fold from 2019 to 2021 while netting nearly  $7B in revenue from $83B in total bets placed on sports in 2022.

Another report by marketdecipher.com revealed similar findings. In fact, its estimated $85B in bets placed in 2023 is forecast to balloon to $288B total by the end of 2032.

Virtual reality sports betting took a step forward with the launch of the VR22 sports betting  platform last October. The service allows users to take in a 360-degree live gaming experience as if they were there in person. Users can interact with the game or match in real time including the ability to place wagers down to a specific play – and even purchase merchandise or NFTs.

Missouri already has remote betting although it has been on a small scale.  In the past several years, a few of our casinos have had what they call “hybrid” wagering.  If a table is too crowded to allow additional players, gamblers are referred to a computer terminal that lets them place bets at the table as if they were physically there. It has been done on a small scale and has generated generally small profits. But it’s an experiment and it works.  Whether the terminal is fifty feet from the table or 50 miles and at someone else’s table, it is still sports wagering. And it is part of gambling’s future.

Another reason present casinos need to reach the public where it is, instead of waiting for the public to come back, is the threat of widespread competition. It is a very real threat and the first part of it could be in business in a few years.  We’ll talk about that in our next edition.

The Choice

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We will decide the future of our state and nation tomorrow.

Some argue we will decide the FATE of our nation tomorrow.

We harken back to the story of an English stable owner in the 16th and 17th Centuries who had forty horses, leading customers to think they could choose one from among the forty.  But the stable owner allowed only the horse in the first stall to be rented, believing that he was keeping the best horses from always being chosen.

Customers believing they had many choices actually had only one. Take it or leave it, even if neither was desirable.

The stable owner was named Thomas Hobson, whose name is preserved in the phrase “Hobson’s Choice,” meaning only one thing is really offered while it appears there are other choices and it isn’t particularly desirable.

Many believe that is what we are facing tomorrow, a Hobson’s Choice.

We’ve all survived the weeks of rhetoric, weeks of misstatements and lies, or misinformation from insiders and outsiders on our social media, weeks of efforts to denigrate competing candidates and competing issues.

We have listened to the two sides paint the picture of the other side. And after listening to all of that noise we have concluded that we have these choices at the top of the ticket:

—A candidate who claims to be middle-class child of immigrants whose party has been branded as Marxist and Socialist and a threat to our democracy by the other party.

—A felon, a congenital liar and narcissist whose party is backing him despite complaints that he wants to emulate Hitler and other dictators and is a threat to our democracy.

Thomas Hobson would be greatly entertained.  Take it or leave it when neither choice seems to be desirable.

The political process seems to have given us horses in the first of two stalls in a stable full of better mounts that we can’t have.

This might not be any help to you at all, but let’s skim the surface of the two possibilities.

Both Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler wrote books: Marx’s Das Kapital, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Marx is described as “a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.”  The description is from Wikipedia, which serious researchers caution should not be considered original research. It is an amalgam of the evaluations done by others presumably well-acquainted with a subject.  So, We are going to rely on one of Wikipedia’s sources, English historian Gareth Stedman Jones, whose work focuses on working class history and Marxist theory and who wrote in 2017 in the journal Nature:

“What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems… it [connects] critical analysis of the economy of his time with its historical roots. In doing so, he inaugurated a debate about how best to reform or transform politics and social relations, which has gone on ever since.”

The same resource describes Hitler as “an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator” of Germany under the Nazi Party that “controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.”  He wrote his book in prison while serving four years for treason after a failed coup in 1923. The book outlined his plans for Germany’s future, the main thesis being that Germany was in danger from “the Jewish peril,” a conspiracy of Jews to gain world control. It is considered a book on political theory. “For example, Hitler announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils: communism and Judaism…Hitler blamed Germany’s chief woes on the parliament…Jews, and Social Democrats, as well as Marxists, though he believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working for Jewish interests. He announced that he wanted to destroy the parliamentary system, believing it to be corrupt in principle…”

So there you have it. A choice between an economic theorist whose theories challenge our capitalistic society and a political theorist who used every means necessary to be an all-powerful manipulator of a political system, including mass incarceration and murder of undesirables.

You might have a different evaluation for these two whose partisans have stereotyped each other throughout this campaign.

We had a coworker who once observed, “Stereotypes are so useful because they save a lot of time.”

In American politics, stereotyping saves the voters a lot of thinking.

And that’s too bad.

From our lofty position, we offer this thought;

Economic theories are abstract offerings that do not imprison or murder those who differ from them.  Political theories can create tangible results that, taken to extremes, can produce (in order) division, disrespect, control through, if necessary, mass incarceration and—-at the very worst—murder.

We have two politicians to think about tomorrow.  It’s too bad none of the others in the stable are available.  It’s take it or leave it time.

Which Hobson’s Choice are you going to make?

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“Winning for Education” Turns Casino Host Cities Into Bigger Losers

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So this is what they get for three decades of being the hosts of Missouri’s casinos—a financial knife in the ribs.

For three decades, ten percent of the casino gambling taxes have gone to the home dock cities and half of the admission fees, too, to pay for the police and fire protection, the infrastructure the cities provide so people can go to and from their casinos, use their bathrooms, and drink city water instead of some of the river water under the ‘excursion boat” where they gamble.

The cities have used some of that money for other improvements—parks, for example.

But not with Amendment 2, the sports wagering proposal on the November ballot.

They’re cut out of it. Completely.

None of the sports gambling taxes will go to the home dock cities.

There will still be an admission fee charged for those who go into the casinos to place their sports bets. But Winning for Missouri, the committee that is, shall we say, gloriously overstating the public benefits of sports wagering, has an economic study saying that, eventually, more than 98% of the bets will be placed online.  There will be no admission fee paid by the casinos for almost all of the sports bets.  And there is no fee in lieu of the admission fee.  They’re going to keep it all.

None of the sports gaming revenue will go to the cities, as it does for present casino table games and slot machines. Admission fees going to host cities will be minimal.

Once again, everybody loses except the casinos and the sports teams—including the host cities (the formal name is Home Dock Cities, harkening back to the days when the industry convinced voters there would be real boats traveling on our big rivers, before they became boats in moats—which is a good thing; we might tell that story in a later entry).

The host cities have been getting the short end of the stick for all of these three decades. For more than a decade, fewer and fewer people have been going to the casinos. At their peak, casinos counted about 54-million admissions.  In the last fiscal year, the admissions continued their decline toward 27 million.

Adding insult to injury is the industry’s refusal to let the legislature increase the admission fees so those home communities admission payments could keep up with inflation. The equivalent of two-dollar admission fee established in 1993 was $4.31 when we checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator Saturday night.

Yes, we mean “let the legislature increase the admission fees.”  Your faithful correspondent has suggested increases to legislators for six years. One of the more frequent responses is, “The casino industry would never buy that.”

The suspicion in the hallways for some time that the industry is, in one way or another, buying something.  It has several political action committees with bottomless checking accounts.  And legislators have to run for re-election for an unfortunately limited number of times.

The influence of the casinos is so ingrained in the legislative process that their representatives don’t even try to justify their statutory or constitutional demands. They just make brief statements about how great sports wagering will be and then sit down.

Not making any accusations, mind you.  We’re just sayin,’ as the colloquial phrase goes.

Anyway—the $4.31 equivalency means the state is getting two 1993 dollars while the casinos keep $2.31 of 2024 money.

The casinos are making more off the admission fee than the state and the home dock cities are making. But the situation is even worse than what we’ve just shown.

Inflation has reduced the purchasing power of those two dollars to about 95 cents.  So, while the home dock cities and the gaming commission are starving for funding with two dollars that are worth 95 cents in contemporary money, the casinos are making $2.31, and the gap between what the casinos keep and what the state and the home dock cities receive widens each year.

Our extensive research and hours with the calculator indicate the home dock cities and the State of Missouri, since the first casinos opened in 1994, have lost almost $1.9 billion ($1,880,392,926) in outright cash payments and in purchasing power combined because the casinos have pressured the legislature into making no change.

Extensive research has calculated how much each of our thirteen cities has lost in the last eight years or so. The individual tables are available but we don’t want to spend the space here to print them. Perhaps that can be done at another time.

Has anyone told our thirteen cities they’re being taken for a ride by their “excursion gambling boats?” The cities are part of the Home Dock Cities Association that one might think would be working to keep the losses from continuing and increasing.  But we have seen representatives for the association spouting the casino line every time they’ve testified before legislative committees.  It’s okay with the association, apparently, that the people they represent keep losing funding and will see no improvement from sports wagering.

The association says it favors the casino position because casinos are economic drivers for the region.  Really?   Can they show any studies that prove it? They haven’t, and the industry’s own statistics reported to the Missouri Gaming Commission show a different story.

We started compiling comprehensive statistics three years ago with a five-year lookback and we have updated figures from the Gaming Commission’s annual and monthly reports. In the now-eight years of statistics, these are the combined losses in cash admissions payments and lost value of those payments for each of our casinos:

  1. Ameristar St. Charles  $46,399,739
  2. River City, Lemay $43,956,210
  3. Hollywood, Maryland Heights $42,069,051
  4. Horseshoe (form Lumiere Place), St. Louis $31,287,455
  5. Ameristar Kansas City $36,290,466
  6. Harrah’s NKC $29,250,328
  7. Argosy Riverside $27,274,214
  8. Bally’s KC $21,852,498
  9. IOC Boonville $13,568,851
  10. Century Cape Girardeau $12,712,770
  11. Century Caruthersville $7,200,880
  12. Jo Frontier $8,357,439
  13. Mark Twain, LaGrange $5,718,114

Amendment 2 will only increase those numbers.

Sports wagering backers say sports wagering will generate hundreds of millions of dollars that will make a big difference for the pay of our classroom teacher.

That isn’t true.  As mentioned earlier, if voters approved Amendment 2, only a few million will be added to the $10-Billion dollar annual budgets of the elementary and secondary schools and the additional multi-million dollar budgets of our colleges and universities.

The industry has testified that increasing the admission fee to benefit our veterans would be a hardship on the industry, especially the smaller casinos. Bunk. It wasn’t but a few years ago when they paid $100 million a year, or more, for a decade and were not whining about the payments being an economic threat.

The industry has offered no statistical evidence to support its contentions.  It has shown no independent studies proving any of the claims made in their advertising leading up to the vote in a few days on Amendment 2.

The industry can’t or won’t supply that information to support its promises and claims.  But everything written in his series of posts is backed up by lengthy research.

Not only have the casinos fought efforts to maintain the value of the admission fee for their host cities, they have laid off about 5,500 of their employees since the number peaked at 11,658 in 2008.  In the most recent fiscal year, the total was down to 6,079.

Will sports wagering bring back those jobs? Not with 98% of wagers made remotely.  We can see a few more people serving drinks in the modest, at best, sportsbooks that will be created in our casinos to handle the few walk-ins. There might be a few runners taking bets to the I-T people—who might represent the biggest employee boost. But the jobs needle won’t move very much.

Let’s look at how much of an economic driver the casinos have caused in our five non-metropolitan areas, where one might suspect significant economic impact would produce community growth. Here are the population numbers for those communities, the census of 1990 first and the 2020 census next:

LaGrange  1,990-825

Caruthersville  7,389-5,562

Cape Girardeau  34,435-39,540

Boonville  7,095-7,969

St. Joseph  71,852-72,473

Five thousand jobs are gone. Limited population growth in some places or losses in others do not indicate casinos are causing their host cities to flourish. Admission Fees are dropping by the thousands, cutting funding for their host cities in half.

We mentioned in an earlier the industry’s claim that casinos “give back generously. Here’s the truth:

Casino “donations” or “contributions” to local causes are pennies on the dollar. Charitable giving during the last six fiscal years has averaged 0.000391% of their adjusted gross revenues. Their adjusted gross receipts have totaled almost $10.5 Billion in those years and their total charitable giving has been just $4.1 million. That’s less than pocket change.  And most of those who read these entries give far more than four-ten thousandth of our personal revenues to charities each year.

Again, we have charted the “giving generously” figures for each casino for the last six fiscal years. But we don’t have room for the charts in this post.  They are available, though.

A few years ago, casinos started reporting how much their customers left behind for charitable donations.  We have spotted six times when the customers provided more than the casinos did.

And that’s just fine with the industry, which fights every effort to restore funding to the towns that welcomed the casinos as great economic boosts for the area. Maybe for a while they were— thirty years ago.  But now?

The casinos also do not mention fees in Amendment 2, and for millions of reasons. The host cities have been getting the short end of the stick every year and it’s been getting worse for a long time. It is going to get even worse for host cities if sports wagering is approved next month.

I often wonder if the thirteen host cities ever get reports from their association or consider Missouri Gaming Commission annual reports that track how their fee income has fallen off a cliff and sports wagering will not save it.

Do not look for sports wagering to lead to reopened closed restaurants in our casinos. Not if only two percent of the sports bettors walk through the turnstiles. At one time, local restaurants feared the casinos would take away their business.  Today there’s far less competition from the casinos for the restaurant business in many of our towns.

One final thing before we go today:

The sports wagering proposal the casinos want to adopt in this election could be the prototype for expanded remote wagering in all other forms of gambling.  As walk-in traffic continues to dwindle, the casinos will be looking for more remote attachments to existing games.  Some casinos already have stuck their toes in those waters in recent years with hybrid table games—blackjack and other games in which people who can’t find room at the gaming table go to a computer nearby to place their bets.  The tests have not generated many dollars, relatively, but tests have been run.  Don’t be surprised if the casinos come back to our lawmakers and ask for remote slot machines and table games—again paying much less tax than those games pay now. It’s a characteristic of business that stacks the cards only for itself.

(We stayed at a casino hotel a few weeks ago and went to the breakfast bar where we placed an order and were given a tag for our table.  A few minutes later, a robot playing a catchy tune, came around the corner, and came down the aisle to my table, my order on its tray.  I took off the plate and the robot went back to the kitchen, trailing its little melody behind it. One nice thing, I suppose, is that I wasn’t given a choice of 15, 18, or 25 percent for a tip. I found myself wondering how soon there would be robots, not people, dealing the cards or spinning the wheel.)

There go more jobs.

Add the casino host cities  to the list of those whose situations will get worse if Amendment 2 is approved with its sweetheart tax rate, its deductions and carryovers, and its reliance on customers who carry casinos in their pockets.

This kind of thing should be handled by our elected representatives and senators, not written by two industries who place profit over any services to the people of the state.  But we have this proposal because our elected senators and representatives didn’t do their job.  Voters are well-advised to give them another chance by defeating a proposal that enriches the casinos and the pro sports teams and impoverishes our educators, our veterans, and the casinos’ own host cities.

Vote for Amendment 2 if you want.  But don’t do it if you think it will benefit anybody but the casinos and the sports teams, no matter what they tell you on the television or with misinformation you will find in your mailbox.

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