Category Archives: education

Winning for Missouri: More Like the Mugging of Missouri 

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One last shot at Amendment 2 before next Tuesday’s vote on it. And a warning that this amendment might have far-reaching results that have gone unnoticed.

Unfortunately, these considerations are being offered to late to be circulated enough to make a difference. But let’s put the issues on the record. Or at least, this person’s perspective.  Disagreements are welcome in the box at the end of this entry. We’ll talk about the casino industry’s efforts and we’ll discuss some sports teams questionable claims late in this post.

A key part of the proposed amendment is the sports wagering tax rate—10% —a back door tax cut of about 25% for all forms of gambling.

And here we must note that later we will discuss a clause in the proposed amendment that can lead to later mischief that will further disadvantage the state and its people.

The industry-supported legislation has never defined sports wagering as a special category.is listed as just another kind of game of skill.  In the lengthy list of those allowable games, it has been inserted after “Double down stud” or “any video representation of such games.”

It is that last clause that nobody has talked about.  But it’s important for future developments in the casino industry.  Here’s why.

People are not going to casinos as they once did.  The generation that has spent hours at the slot machines and the tables is dying off. Admissions are almost half what they were a dozen years ago or so.  As this trend continues, the casino industry must find ways to get customers to play these games. If they won’t go to the casinos, the casinos must—in effect—take the games to the consumers. This amendment is a template for later proposals to expand remote wagering to other forms of gambling.

This amendment legalizes remote betting in our casinos for the first time. Some of our casinos already have tested a version of remote gaming within the casinos, calling it “hybrid gaming.” In those casinos, customers who can’t find room at their favorite gaming table have gone to a nearby computer terminal, have set up their account, and have placed bets at the table as if they were there.

The tests haven’t generated much revenue. But the system has been tested.  No matter what the industry calls it, whether it’s fifty feet from the table or fifty miles from the sportsbook, it’s remote wagering. Don’t be surprised if casinos become more involved with it.  And that phrase is going into the constitution if voters approve Amendment Two.

We are not sure if that phrase in the amendment will mean casinos can offer remote betting on table games and slot machines without more legislative action. But it would not be in the proposal if the industry did not have a reason for it being there.

The Casino industry cleverly set the parameters for the discussion of sports wagering early:

—We can’t do sports wagering at 21% (the rate the state established more than three decades ago for table games and slot machines (incidentally, about 85% of casino revenues come from the slots).

—Sports wagering is different from other forms of gambling and needs special treatment.

Neither statement is true.

The industry has consistently claimed sports wagering is unique and requires its own special betting area and its own special tax rate, the latter reason justified differently year-to-year in bills introduced in the legislature.  The first bills proposed a tax rate of 6.25% (the lowest in the nation), 6.75% (the present low), 8%, and 10%.  The industry has seemed to have trouble sticking to its story when advocating a tax rate of less than 21%.

A couple of years ago the Senate tried to make the rate 12% and there was talk that the casinos would compromise on 15% because it was the average of the states around us.  We’ll get to that in a little bit.

The truth is that sports wagering is just another item on the gambling menu and its presence on that list supports that point. But the casinos have tried to get the legislature to believe it is special. And they want voters in a few days to believe it, too, so they can get a cut in overall tax rates (by our calculation) of about 25%.

The industry has never produced any independent studies in any legislative hearing we have attended, to justify the claim that sports wagering is a fragile flower needing lots of TLC, including the low tax. None of the pro-amendment advertising has offered any justification for it either.  And the voters, who understandably don’t closely follow the policy-making, or lack of it, by the legislature are left to make decisions based on thirty-second television commercials of questionable verity.

One industry argument has been that casinos will spend a lot of money establishing a unique area where the sports wagering can take place, an argument that falls apart because all forms of gambling have THEIR unique betting areas.  It’s why you can’t roll dice at a blackjack table. You can’t play poker at the roulette wheel table. You can’t play craps at the poker table and you can’t bet on where the ball will land on the big wheel at the Texas Hold ‘Em table.

There is nothing inherently unique in sports betting, regardless of industry claims. It operates the same way as other forms of wagering.  The consumer has money; the casinos have a system that will take all of it through time. The player at the poker table places a bet. So does a bettor in the sports betting area. The casino processes the bets, paying the winners and keeping the losers’ money. At the end of the day, the casino proceeds go into the same bank account with the proceeds from table games and slot machines.

Every year, the industry seems to have changed its justification for a sweetheart tax rate, raising a simple question that should been asked but never was: “How can the industry’s claims be trusted if it cannot stick to its own story?

In 2019, the industry demanded a 6.75% rate because “that’s what they charge in Las Vegas.”  A quick review of the Nevada gaming laws showed something the industry avoided telling our lawmakers: that 6.75% ALL forms of gambling in Nevada.  The industry also neglected to tell the legislators that the Nevada gaming law allows no deductions and no carryovers of casino losses from one month to the next, as is proposed in Amendment 2.  It was pointed out that the Nevada template would mean that Missouri would have two choices: either lower its present tax rate to 6.75 so all forms of gambling would be treated uniformly or to charge sports wagering a 21% tax.

Here are other reasons offered for a low tax rate:

—The casinos need to keep the extra money to properly promote and advertise this unique form of gambling. A representative of Penn National Gaming told a House committee in 2022 that a higher tax would hinder Missouri’s ability to compete with illegal gaming sites. He said, “When you are able to spend more in marketing, you are able to drive more in volume and revenues.”

The position of the industry that money should be taken away from the education fund and from home dock cities to subsidize promotions and advertising was questionable when the industry was generating revenues of about $1.7 billion at the time. Wouldn’t you think the industry should pay for its own promotions and advertising?

A critic argued that there is no reason the state should subsidize advertising for an industry of that size by reducing funding for the school systems and home dock cities (ten percent of the gaming tax goes to the thirteen host cities of Missouri’s casinos).  Additionally, major betting companies already were advertising on professional sports broadcasts and have stepped up their advertising since.

The proposal for using money traditionally earmarked for the education fund to publicize and promote sports wagering included no accountability language that would have required casinos to show the money actually had been used as proposed instead of just pocketed.

They also claimed the money not given the state in taxes was needed to convince Missourians to quit using illegal betting sites.  We’ll touch on that a little bit later.

—The casinos originally claimed the house advantage in sports wagering is “only” four percent (in 2023 the industry testified it was five percent).  But a study done for the UNLV Center for Gaming Research indicates that four percent is higher than most popular table games, sometimes double or more, and the industry has never asked for a favorable tax rate for table games.

In truth, the house advantage for sports wagering is more than four or even five percent, as the casino industry has claimed in some later legislative committee hearings. The website legalsportsreport.com charts statistics month-by-month in every state from the first month sports wagers were made in that state. As of last Sunday night, the webpage calculated $408-Billion dollars had been wagered in states allowing casino gambling on sports. The casino advantage worked out to 8.6%, more than double what the industry told legislators, and adding up to $35.1 Billion dollars.

Delaware, which has the highest tax on casino revenues, had the highest house advantage—25.1 to 46.5.  Delaware taxes casinos at a 50% and we’ve not heard any organized opposition to it.

Another excuse has been that Missouri needs a low tax rate to compete with surrounding states. Kansas is at 10. Iowa’s rate on casino earnings is 6.75, and according to an industry spokesperson. Missouri needs to have a low tax to keep Missourians from going to another state to place their sports bets.

The industry has presented no independent studies indicating casino customers care about the amount of taxes the casinos pay. In reality, the so-called competition rests on a simple question: Does Missouri have legal sports wagering? If Missouri legalizes it, Missourians presumably will place bets here because they don’t have go to some other state.

The industry also claimed it needs to have a much lower tax so it can pay for building sportsbook facilities within the casinos. If ninety percent or more of sports wagering will be done remotely, there’s not much reason for an elaborate sportsbook.  And, besides, building a sports betting facility in a casino should be considered a normal business expense with its own tax implications at the end of the business year.

This amendment has been called a “compromise between the stakeholders”—the six professional sports teams, the casino industry, and the remote betting industry” by St. Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III.

But there are far more stakeholders than that. None of their representatives were invited to work on this “compromise.” Where were representatives of public education, host cities, veterans, the Access Missouri Scholarship Program, the National Guard program that provides veterans’ funeral escorts, people who develop gambling problems (we have seen several studies indicating those problems will triple with sports wagering), or even the Missouri Gaming Commission?

Here’s an answer: They were not invited because they were not considered participants in drafting gambling policy. Instead, they are industry targets whose only usefulness is based on how much money the industry can take from them or keep from programs benefitting them.

There’s one more stakeholder. The legislature, hired by the citizens to protect their interests. But the legislature has been MIA in protecting its constituents. The “compromise” is not a compromise at all.  It was, instead, an agreement to have the legislature give each of the stakeholders what they want. When the legislature fumbled several chances to satisfy the teams and the casinos, Amendment 2 was created.

It’s important as we reach the conclusion of these discussions to ask, “How did we reach this point?”

One reason this issue is on the ballot is that the legislature refused to resolve a competing issue—the legality of the gambling machines in many of our convenience stores, Video Lottery Terminals.

Supporters of video lottery terminals, while professing that they are legal, want the legislature to make them legal. The casinos see them as competing for their slot machine revenues and have not allowed an up-or-down vote on the VLT bills.  Supporters of the VLTs have filibustered the sports wagering legislation, demanding VLT legalization legislation be part of any sports wagering measure. The stalemate, especially in the Senate, has been a key factor in the pretty disgraceful deadlocks there that have resulted in historically-low levels of bill passage during the last three sessions.

The legislature lacked the courage in the face of extensive and aggressive lobbying by the casino industry to establish policies protecting the state’s interests and year after year considered the industry proposals without question. Only once that I recall did I hear a legislative committee member seriously press the chief industry lobbyist on some of these issues—Senator Denny Hoskins who was the leader in the unsuccessful efforts to legalize VLTs—was told he was out of time before he had finished his questioning. The replies he had received were vague at best.

A couple of years ago, I talked to the sponsor of a bill raising the tax rate to ten percent. A year earlier he had sponsored the industry’s bill that set the rate at eight percent. “What’s magical about ten percent?” I asked. “Last year it was only eight.”

He responded, “I figured that if ten was good enough for Jesus it was good enough for me.”

I was stunned for a second or two, and when I recovered my composure, I asked, “Jesus had twelve disciples not ten.  Can I get you up to 12?”

All I got in response was a smirk.

I found his responses to my questions arrogant, disrespectful, and dismissive. While I would not use the same phrases to characterize those who have advocated for this legislation, I think it is accurate to say there has been a certain confidence on their part that no outside opinions would be tolerated in the annual legalization efforts.

The legislature’s refusal to challenge industry-backed bills year after year is an indication of who has been in charge of things in the Capitol on this issue. Its inability to deliver what the industry—and in the last few years, the pro sports teams—wanted means the issue is likely to be put into the Missouri Constitution next week and the legislature will not be able to change things to protect the interests of the people of Missouri very easily.

I expect the mugging of Missouri and its people to succeed next Tuesday.  And we can thank a few generations of the people we think represent us at the Capitol for aiding and abetting it through their inaction.

 

 

“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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“Winning For Education Makes Veterans Bigger Losers

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It’s about the time of year for the casino industry to put out its annual news release that the industry will “honor” veterans on Veterans Day, November 11, in “special ways.”  Veterans can get free or discounted meals (some specify the meals are from a limited menu) that day. They also can get a card for some free play, or spin a wheel for a chance at a free play card, or get complimentary tickets to a casino entertainment venue—stuff like that.

Of course, the casinos hope the veterans will drop a few dollars at the tables or the slot machines while they are there.

The truth is the casinos care about our veterans only in terms of how much they can take from their pockets and with sports wagering, their regard for veterans sinks to a new low.

“We give back generously,” says the industry’s Missouri web page.  Rubbish.

If you are a veteran, know a veteran, and/or are part of a veterans group, you need to read what we are going to tell you today about the sports betting proposal on the November ballot, Amendment 2, and circulate it. It makes our veterans even bigger losers than they have been. The casino industry behind this proposition could have written it to solve a major financial problem affecting our veterans. It did not do it.

Should veterans vote for it?  It’s up to them. But they should understand that the proposal does more TO veterans than it will do for veterans.

Basic fact: Missouri has seven veterans nursing homes that provide 1238 long-term skilled nursing beds. They are in Cameron, Mexico, St. James, Warrensburg, St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, and St. James.

Their major source of funding is from the casino $2 admission fee.  Funds raised from that fee go to the Missouri Gaming Commission, which uses some of that money to pay for regulation of the casino industry.  Nine million dollars a year are earmarked for the Access Missouri College Scholarship program and the National Guard Trust Fund that provides money for military rites at veterans’ funerals. A tiny amount goes to deal with problem gambling, if the Mental Health Department asks for it from the commissoion. After those deductions are taken, the remainder goes to the Veterans Commission Capital Improvements Trust Fund—which provides money for the seen nursing homes.

Admissions fees at our casinos that go to the veterans homes have been declining from $30.5 million in fiscal year 2012-2013 to just $11.2 million ten years later, a decline of 63%.

A report given to the Veterans Commission in July showed one-third of the nursing home beds were empty. It also showed the average daily cost of providing care had risen from $265 in 2018 to $469 in 2024, a 77% increase—and the purchasing power of each dollar was about 48 cents. .

Veterans Commission representative Aimee Packard told me last week, “Thankfully, the Governor and General Assembly have provided additional state funding to help ensure we are able to continue to care for Missouri’s Veteran heroes.”

Understand something else. These figures represent raw dollars.  Because the 1993 law that established the two-dollar admission fee had no escalator clause in it, the admission fee has never been increased to account for inflation.  The purchasing power of a 1993 dollar was only 47.5 cents in the most recent fiscal year, meaning the veterans homes are getting far less cash than they did a decade ago while the purchasing power of the buys a lot less at a time when the costs of care are substantially higher.

In other words, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated, as of Monday, the contemporary equivalent of two 1993 dollars is $4.42.  The casinos are paying the state two 1993 dollars with purchasing power of only 92 cents while they keep $2.42 in contemporary money. They are making more money on the admission fees than the state is making.

How’s that for supporting our veterans—which the industry has many times patted itself on the back for doing?

What does this mean for sports wagering and veterans?

Simply this:  Amendment 2 does nothing to stop this admission fee shortfall. Why?

Industry forecasts dating to 2019 were that 90% of all sports wagers would be done remotely within ten  years after the wagering is legalized, meaning there will be no admissions for 90% of all sports wagers.

Will the 10% of bettors who walk through the turnstiles to bet on sports be enough to offset the ongoing 2-3% in overall annual admissions?  If it does, the amount of money generated for veterans will be minimal.

And the casinos will pocket all of the revenue from remote sports betting without “contributing” (as they like to phrase it) a dime to the veterans nursing home fund.

Here’s the truth.  The casinos like to brag that they have “contributed” or “donated” (by now) $400 million to veterans nursing homes.

You know what donations and contributions are, don’t you?  That’s the money  you voluntarily drop into the red kettle at Christmas, the pledge you make to Alzheimer’s Walks and Cancer runs, the envelope you drop in the tray at worship services, the check you write to the United Way.

In 2012, when Governor Nixon asked the legislature to increase the admission fees by one dollar, the casino industry sent letters to Missouri newspapers saying (in excerpts): “As good corporate citizens, casinos do more than their fair share for military veterans…. No single industry in Missouri provides that kind of financial support to veterans programs…. We honor and support our military veterans and will continue to do so, and we ask legislators to find an equitable source of funding for veterans homes.”

No single industry provides that kind of support to veterans?  If the veterans homes had to rely on “that kind of support,” there would be a lot of boarded-up windows and “no trespassing” signs in a neglected yard.

“As good corporate citizens, casinos do more than their fair share for military veterans?”  Doing their “fair share” for veterans. Their fair share has withered in the last decade. The casinos have an interesting definition of “fair share,” don’t they.

With friends such as this, who needs enemies?

Let us be abundantly clear: The casino industry has provided money to the gaming commission and its worthy causes that include veterans only because state law FORCES the industry to make those payments. If this industry was such a great supporter of veterans and their nursing homes, wouldn’t you think it would have voluntarily maintained funding for those it might give a free or reduced-cost meal to on Veterans Day?

The casinos and their sports teams enablers could have written their proposed amendment to establish some kind of remote wagering fee that would stop the financial bleeding for the gaming commission and the veterans nursing homes.

But, no. They didn’t. The casino industry wants to pocket every dime it can, veterans be damned.

So much for giving back generously.

The Veterans Commission Nursing Home program is able to operate only because the legislature for several years has taken money away from other programs to keep the nursing homes open, even at a reduced level.

Before you vote to legalize sports wagering in Missouri, think what you are doing TO  our veterans, not for them.

Ask yourself: to whom do we owe a greater allegiance: casinos and millionaires playing sports—or our veterans.  And our schools.

If a ten percent tax on sports wagering proposed in the sweetheart deal that is called Amendment 2 will generate $100 million dollars for schools in the next five years, that means the casinos are going to have revenues of more than One BILLION dollars.

A few table scraps will fall to the floor for veterans.

Who needs money more—casinos or veterans and schools? Amendment 2 might produce a drop in education’s bucket.  But the veterans bucket will be increasingly dry.

Maybe it would be better for the people you elect to have the courage to represent their constituents on gambling issues.  But it’s going to take more political courage than I have seen for several years to do it.

Think about it. Feel free to circulate these postings to your teachers, teacher groups, and veterans and their groups.

Vote how you want. But understand who will be paying for you to have a chance to lose money betting on a sporting event. Our schools and our veterans, that’s who.

There’s a third group that will get the shaft if Amendment 2 passes: the casinos’ own host cities.  The casinos don’t give a damn about them, either.   That’s next.

One last thing today: We have a comment box at the bottom of each of these entries.  Several months ago, a person with the industry was heard in a crowded restaurant where were having dinner with friends say to them—in a voice loud enough to be heard by many of the other diners, “Don’t listen to him; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

We invite the casino industry to use that box below to prove it.

“Winning for Education” Makes Losers of Teachers, Veterans

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If you are a teacher, know a teacher, and/or are part of a teacher’s organization, you need to read what we are going to tell you about the sports betting proposal on the November ballot, Amendment 2, which is deceptive and hardly moves the financial needle for teacher’s salaries.

If you are a veteran, know a veteran, and/or are part of a veterans group, you need to read what we are going to tell you on Wednesday about the sports betting proposal on the November ballot, Amendment 2. It makes veterans even bigger losers than they have been.

Today we’re going to talk about the casino industry’s manipulation of voters with its campaign that will not deliver, by far, the great benefits to public education system the casino industry wants voters to think it will.

We are going to throw a lot of numbers your way today. The numbers are based on the casino industry’s own statistics as reported annually to the Missouri Gaming Commission and a couple of other sources.

They again suggest the casino industry is not shooting straight with us. But that’s not unusual.

We do not mind if you favor sports wagering.  But if you vote for it on the basis of the advertising by “Winning for Education,” the front organization for the casinos and their sports team bedmates, you need to know what you are doing TO our teachers, not for our teachers.

First: some basic information.  Missouri’s thirteen casinos generate revenue for state programs and services from two sources: a 21% tax on casino adjusted gross revenues (what’s left after all successful bettors are paid off) and admission fees ($2 per admission; we won’t distract you with the process of determining admissions; that’s for our next post about making veterans bigger losers than they have been for more than a decade).

Missouri had 521 school districts in fiscal year 2023. We will use that number in our calculations. It had 88,669 classroom teachers and 18,097 administrators and supervisors (including people such as guidance counselors, school nurses, and librarians), in 2,355 buildings.  The enrollment for the 2022-23 school year was 861,494.

The legislature approved a budget for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education of $10,394,092,704 for the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Gaming consultant Chris Krafcik estimates total state revenue from the 10% tax on sports wagering will produce $4.7 million in the first year and $38.7 million in the fifth year of sports betting.

If we divide those figures by 521, the number of school districts, we find that sports wagering will produce an average of only $9,021 per district in the first year.  In year five, the number rises to $74,280 per district.

If we divide those numbers by 88,669 (the number of classroom teachers listed above) we find the average teacher could get a raise of $53.00 in the first year and a raise of $436 in the fifth year. Not even close to keep up with the cost of living.

If we spread those amounts among teachers AND administrators, all 106,756 of them, the average wage increase in the first year is $44 and in year five, it is $369.

That’s less than a tank of gas in the first year and not many groceries in the fifth one.

If, after looking at these numbers, that you still believe the industry commercials saying sports wagering will make any significant difference in the Missouri teacher salaries, I will sell you the Gateway Arch. The attractive teachers in the commercials who talk of sports wagering generating more than $100 million dollars in five years are blowing smoke.  While the statement might be true in terms of raising that amount of money, the suggestion that it will produce anything meaningful for teachers is cattle byproduct.

Let’s assume the elementary and secondary education budget does not increase in the next five years.  Simple division indicates $38.7 million for education in the fifth year of sports wagering would add .00037% to that budget.  Four ten-thousandths of one percent, to round things up.

It’s even worse. These numbers only involve elementary and secondary education.  The proposed amendment says funds will go to higher education, too.

Missouri has SIXTY-SEVEN institutions that are accredited as degree-granting post-secondary education institutions. There are thirteen public universities.  There are 39 private universities (which are not excluded. The language of the amendment says only “higher education.”), and thirteen community colleges.  There also are some schools from other states that offer programs or degrees in Missouri.  The amendment contains no language limiting the funding to public post-secondary schools, not does it address in any way those out-of=state institutions with degree programs here.

We haven’t come up with how many faculty, staff, and administrative employees those higher education institutions would add to the pie.

But the school won’t get all of that money to begin with, assuming there is money from casino taxes.

Money for education will not be used for education until amounts are taken out for:

—Regulation.   The Missouri Gaming Commission can have some of that money if the various licensing fees casinos will pay do not fully pay the costs of regulation, and

—“the greater of 10% of such annual tax revenues or $5,000,000 to the Compulsive Gamblers Fund.”

Those paltry raises we’ve calculated for our elementary and secondary school folks might wind up being measured in pennies, or pocket change.

If, after looking at these numbers, that you still believe the industry commercials saying sports wagering will make any significant difference in the Missouri teacher salaries, I will sell you the Gateway Arch. The attractive teachers in the commercials who talk of sports wagering generating more than $100 million dollars in five years are blowing smoke.  While the statement might be true in terms of raising that amount of money, the suggestion that it will produce anything meaningful for teachers is cattle byproduct.

Let’s assume the elementary and secondary education budget does not increase in the next five years.  Simple division indicates $38.7 million for education in the fifth year of sports wagering would add .00037% to that budget.  Four ten-thousandths of one percent, to round things up.

And that doesn’t even calculate how much MORE education would get if sports wagering would be taxed at the same rate as other forms of Missouri gambling, 21%.  But Amendment 2 sets a rate at less than half of that and then has provisions that can significantly lower taxable revenue or even make it a deficit, meaning there will be some months when the casinos put NO money into the education fund.

The amendment also allows casinos to carry over the loss to the next month’s calculations, lowering tax revenue for that month too—or increasing the possibility that a casino can calculate another zero-revenue/zero tax month.

In the 2023 legislative session, a Senate bill proposed boosting the minimum teacher’s salary from $25,000 to $38,000 and increasing the salary for a teacher with a master’s degree and at least ten years of experience from $33,000 to $46,000.  The bill never came to a vote because of internal dissension within the Senate, thanks to the Freedom Caucus.

The National Education Association  April 24, 2023 released a report showing Missouri ranks 50th in starting teacher pay with an average of $34,502 with only 43 districts paying started new teachers $40,000 or more. The report calculated a minimum living wage was $46,944.

A World Population Review study of 2024 salaries lists Missouri as one of seven states starting teachers at less than  $50,000 with only Montana paying less.  The overall Missouri average teacher salary in this study is $53,999, ranking Missouri 46th ahead of Mississippi, South Dakota, Florida, and West Virginia.

Yeah, sports wagering will solve a lot of problems with our teacher salaries and other education system problems.. Suuuure it will.

Don’t bet on sports wagering because it will do wonderful things for our schools. It won’t.  Amendment 2 just makes the drop in the bucket even smaller, thanks to the sweetheart tax rate and the deductions that now will allow a reduction of taxable revenue.

We aren’t sure why any dubious proposition that appears on our ballots thinks it can succeed by telling you it will do great things for education. They don’t. And this one surely won’t.

Governor Joe Teasdale once told me, “I’ll never lie to you but there will be times when I won’t tell you the truth.”   I interpreted the second half of that sentence to contradict the first.  But that’s the kind of disinformation campaign being waged by the casino industry and its bedmates, our major league sports teams.

But what do you expect from an industry that is built on the concept that you will be a loser more often than you will be a winner?

Give your local education leaders these numbers and see how many of your teachers would make commercials endorsing this proposal.

Amendment 2 will be a loser for our schools.  You can bet on it.

The Gun, The School, The Town , The Times

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I took a gun to school once.

In a more innocent time.

A long, long time ago.

It was a revolver that held seven .22-short bullets.

It wasn’t loaded.

Here is the gun:

Well, not really THE gun. Our house burned down three weeks before Christmas when I was a high school freshman.  I lost my coin collection that included a mis-strike nickel that had two heads, several plastic model airplanes, a baseball card collection that probably included a Mantle rookie card, a few Red Man Chewing Tobacco cards, and assorted other baseball cards that would have put both of our children through college had the collection survived, a collection of Lone Ranger novels (since re-accumulated through the years), my old maid aunt Gertrude’s National Geographic collection that began in 1907 (I had looked through only a few as I sought out the ones that had stories about African natives whose lack of above-the-waist attire was very interesting to a boy my age), and the gun.

Today I would be rushed to the principal’s office; my parents would be called; I would be home-schooled for a while, to say the least.

My great-grandfather played the fife for the 126th Illinois Infantry that served under General Sherman at Vicksburg and then was instrumental in gaining control of northern Arkansas, including the capture of Little Rock.  He enlisted in another town in Moultrie County and after the war lived in what we called a big city in those days—Decatur—for sixty more years where he once owned an ice cream store.

His pistol was the first Smith & Wesson pistol.   Not THE first, but—well, you get the idea.

I think I took it to school because we were studying the Civil War in an elementary school class and it was no big deal.

I don’t remember the duck-and-cover drills some children of that vintage practiced, thinking that hiding under a school desk would save them from an Atom Bomb.   We had fire drills, though.  A couple of times a year.  Outside we’d go. Never in rain or snow but I do remember some cold days standing on the sidewalk while the teachers checked every room to make sure one of my classmates hadn’t decided to hide out.

I grew up in two towns in which Abraham Lincoln, then a circuit-riding lawyer, occasionally visited to take part in trials.  I have been told that the one in which I spent the most time had a Sundown Ordinance—no Negroes allowed in town after dark.  (I use the word because that’s the word that was used then.) Many years later I considered the irony of a town where Lincoln was a sometime-lawyer that told black people they were not welcome after sundown.  But then, as I have learned, Lincoln’s own attitudes toward black people were pretty undeveloped then.

My class was the first to graduate from the new high school that I could watch being constructed when I was in my Junior English class in the old high school—which was torn down a few months ago. Some black men from Decatur were part of the construction crew and one day one of my classmates told me he had heard that they planned to move their families to our town after the new school was built and “if they do, there’s going to be trouble.”

I couldn’t understand why he felt that way. I was young, innocent of worldly things.  I did not meet my first black people until the second semester of my freshman college year when the Residential Assistant for my dormitory floor brought a couple of black guys around to every room and introduced them.  To me they were just guys.  Years later, I figured out that the university was integrating the dormitories (I watched the first black football and basketball players perform for the school).  By the time I left, America had undergone a painful change. I had changed, too, picketing a segregated bowling alley one evening with my church group, and came to work in a segregated city with an HBCU that would taste violence during the Civil Rights struggle.

My little town surrounded by the rich land of the Illinois prairie still has high school sports teams unapologetically called Redskins. It’s about fifty miles from the University teams are called the Fighting Illini. My class ring, safely in a bank deposit box, features the abstract image of a Native American Chief.  Or at least the profile of a Native American in an ornate headdress.

Not commenting. Just saying.

One of our World War II heroes was a B-25 pilot who wasn’t satisfied to just fly over his hometown. He buzzed it.  Stood that plane on its wing and flew around the courthouse dome.  That was before we moved there.  By the time we moved there he was our school principal.  Col. Loren Jenne’s Army Air Corps uniform is in the county historical museum.  It’s a really, really good recently-built museum constructed with the help of an advisor for the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.  Visiting it for a reunion a couple of years ago made me realize how lacking we are in Jefferson City for a good local historical museum.

The town library’s board room holds part of local resident’s collection of 700 hood ornaments and the former Illinois Masonic Home has one of the largest collections of sea shells in the country.

I had a laid-back high school history teacher who once told me he became a teacher because “it was better than working for a living.”  Everybody had to do a report on some historical event for his class. Mine was on the Battle of Gettysburg. It took as long as the battle took—three days. Even then I could write long.

I missed one of the biggest events in town history because I was in college.  Richard Nixon dropped in on this little town of about 3600 during his 1960 campaign. Town leaders had invited him and challenger John Kennedy to hold an old-fashioned debate at the annual buffalo barbecue.  Kennedy didn’t show but Nixon ate half a sandwich and then spoke to about 17,000 people who gathered in a park where I had learned to love playing baseball.  A Boy Scout who helped provide security at Nixon’s table picked up the remainder of his buffalo sandwich and took it home.  His mother put the remnant in a pickle jar and froze it.  Sixty years later, he published a book, The Sandwich That Changed My Life, recounting how the sandwich is still in that jar but occasionally had been on public display including the day he took it to Los Angeles for an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Carson gave him one of his half-eaten sandwiches, which led people such as Tiny Tim and Steve Martin to make additional contributions.

Nixon wasn’t the first presidential aspirant to visit my little town.  When Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were holding their famous debates throughout the state—Lincoln was challenging Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate—Lincoln paused to give a speech in a little grove of trees that is now the site of the civic center. Douglas wasn’t there. However, a riot between Lincoln and Douglas supporters broke out on the town square during the 1858 campaign.

We had a Brown Shoe factory, as did many small towns, for decades. It was near the now-gone elementary school I entered late in my fourth grade year.  I hit a softball through one of its windows one day during a noon hour game on the vacant lot between the school and the factory. Foreign competition shut it down. The building is still there, re-purposed several times. .

I went away from that little town to study journalism at the University of Missouri.  In those first few days, new college students ask and are asked many times, “Where are you from?”  There were nods of the head when the answers were St. Louis, or Kirksville, or Joplin, or Polo, or Hannibal (my roommate), or other Missouri towns.  But when I said, “Sullivan, Illinois,” there was the second question:

“Where’s that?”

And I would reach into my back pocket and pull out an official Illinois State Highway Map, William G. Stratton, Governor, and I would unfold it and show them.  Today I would say, “It’s about 40 minutes north of Effingham” and everybody would know because Effingham, then a bowling alley and a gas station-small town on Highway 40, is a major stop on straight and boring I-70 between St. Louis and Terre Haute.  I’m sure some of my new classmates walked away thinking, “He’s too weird.”

In a few days, I’m headed back to Sullivan for my (mumble-mumble) class reunion. I cherish these get-togethers, especially as our numbers dwindle.  I have a nice red polo shirt, although I wish I could find an appropriate red and black sweatshirt or jacket to wear while I ride in one of the 1959 convertibles a classmate has arranged for classmates to ride in during the homecoming parade. It shouldn’t be as hard as it was the other day to find the right thing in Jay and Chiefs country.

But the other day I bought a new car that’s red with black trim and I hope that is appropriate.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that the last time we met as a class was the night we graduated.  Now, we are the Community of ’59.  Then, were a homogenous group raised in the same county, for the most part, part of the same culture for the first 18 years of our life, no more acutely aware of the greater world beyond us than teenagers today probably are plugged into life outside their schools.  But since then, life has changed us, has filled us with our own unique experiences and we come together as diverse individuals shaped by the decades that have passed.

Yet, when I think of them, it is easy to see them in my mind as perpetually young. And when we meet, we don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing. Instead we talk as contemporary people who have been friends for a long, long time who have nothing to prove to each other or no reason to try to impress one another.  We are special friends bound together by long-ago experiences who can talk about present issues, even those on which we not unexpectedly differ, and then go back to our homes and our separate futures cherishing this one more chance to be with each other.

I’ve lived in Missouri (except for three summers while I was in college) for almost eighty percent of my life. Each year I travel from Jefferson City to Indianapolis for a couple of races.  I usually stop for lunch in Effingham.  And each time, I feel a little tug to turn north.

All of our towns and each of us have stories such as these. Someday, descendants I will never know, might read these stories.

Think about writing yours.

For them.

I went to school with a gun one day in a time my grandchildren probably would not understand, when the only drill we had to worry about was the fire drill.

That was a long, long time ago. But if nobody every tells about those times, how can anybody else ever hope that there ever can be that kind of safe era again?

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The Mugging of Missouri—Preview (and a correction**)

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The Missouri Gaming Commission has released its report for Fiscal Year 2023-2024. Your careful observer will be spending a few days updating his statistical tables while at the same time researching material for a speech at the Missouri River Regional Library on October 8th that will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the document that created this nation (no, it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence but I will be referring to two words in the Declaration as well as some words spoken in Washington four score and seven years later).

But when we return to the topic, we will show you why Amendment 2 not only represents a mugging of our public education system, but how it also deepens the decades of the casino industry’s mugging of our veterans nursing home program and their own host cities.

***We have corrected a paragraph in our previous post on Amendment 2 in which we addressed Highway Patrol security at casinos and said the casinos do not reimburse the gaming commission for those expenses.  We have corrected that paragraph to read:

The Highway Patrol provides security officers at our casinos. In the original version of this post, we reported the casinos do not reimburse the state for the costs of that security. We were incorrect. The annual report for FY2023-24, which became available to us after the original publication of this review, shows the casinos reimbursed the gaming commission $15.4 million for enforcement, a category that not only includes watching out for unlawful activity on the gaming floor but also includes investigations of those seeking various licenses connected to casino gambling.

We will continue to review our posts on this subject. It is not our intent to mislead our readers as we cast a critical eye at the claims of the industry and its allied professional sports teams.

Feel free to circulate these observations to friends, education groups, local newspapers, veterans groups, and your state legislators and/or candidates.  And don’t be afraid to react in the box at the end of our entries. We enjoy hearing from our participants in these public dialogues.

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Winning for Education is a Loser for Education—(updated to include corrected information regarding enforcement of gaming laws)

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—and for everybody but our casinos and our pro sports teams.

After watching an wholesome young woman, who describes herself in a commercial as a mother and a former teacher, tell me that approval of Amendment 2 in November (Sports Wagering) will mean millions of dollars for our public schools, I stopped by the State Auditor’s office to get some information that would tell me if the commercial is true.

I wanted the truth because my experience is that the casino industry and the sports teams pushing to legalize sports wagering have not been shooting straight for years with the legislature and now they are not shooting straight with us, the voters.

When a court ruling recently allowed the amendment to be on the November ballot, spokesman Jack Cardetti with Winning for Education, the misleadingly named organization campaigning for voter approval, proclaimed the decision a “big victory” that will “provide tens of millions in permanent, dedicated funding each year for our public schools.”  And he sounded the long-spoken mantra of the movement that approval would end Missourians going to other states for sports betting “which deprives our Missouri public schools of much-needed funding. A vote for Amendment 2 will bring those dollars back to Missouri classrooms.”

The fiscal note, as the document is called, tells a far different story about Amendment 2, the way it is written and the situations it creates. And it suggests the claim that approval would provide “tens of millions in permanent dedicated funding” for education is much less than fully true.

Your faithful observer has opposed the sports wagering bills in the legislature for several years, not because he opposes casinos (that issue was settled in 1992) or sports wagering. I have no use for them, but I have friends who lose as much money in an evening at a casino as I will spend treating Nancy to dinner and a movie or something like that. I leave the moral judgments on these issues to others. I am opposed, however, to casino and sports teams masquerading their multi-million dollar money-grabs as great benefits to the state, particularly to education which the fiscal note states clearly is not the case.

Those two industries will write as many checks as they need to, to sell the idea that sports wagering will make the state financially better off.   Far from it, as I hope you will learn today as we review the fiscal note for Amendment 2.

Let us start with something not in the fiscal note. Casinos will pay a 10% tax on revenues from sports wagering if Amendment 2 passes. Revenues from the two forms of gambling we have now—slots and table games—are taxed at 21%. The amendment, therefore, proposes an AVERAGE tax rate for all forms of gambling of 15.5%.

That’s right. Vote for Amendment 2 and you are voting to give the $1.9 Billion casino industry that plans to grow by hundreds of millions more an overall 25% tax cut. We will return to this issue later.

The Auditor, in assembling the fiscal note, asked a long list of state agencies to determine if the proposal has a monetary impact on them, positive or negative. Most say it won’t affect them but the Department of Revenue, which collects taxes from you, me, sports teams, and casinos, concludes after a lengthy division-by-division assessment:

“The Department of Revenue assumes this IP will not generate any revenue to the state.”

(“IP” refers to the initiative petition.) Then, the fiscal note details why it won’t.

Although the teams and the casinos will claim great financial benefits for the state, the department points out that Amendment 2 does not give the Revenue Department any power to COLLECT any taxes or fees. While the Gaming Commission is authorized to issue licenses for mobile betting companies, it is not authorized to COLLECT any of those fees. “It appears these retail license fees will not generate any revenue to the state, the Commission, or to the Compulsive Gaming Prevention Fund,” says the assessment of licensing fees, a phrasing used two other times on two other issues.

While the proposed amendment sets a ten percent tax on sports wagering revenues, says the fiscal note, it does not require casinos to pay it. “Without the identification of an agency to collect the tax, no tax can be collected,” says the study.

The Highway Patrol provides security officers at our casinos. In the original version of this post, we reported the casinos do not reimburse the state for the costs of that security. We were incorrect. The annual report for FY2023-24, which became available to us after the original publication of this review, shows the casinos reimbursed the gaming commission $15.4 million for enforcement, a category that not only includes watching out for unlawful activity on the gaming floor but also includes investigations of those seeking various licenses connected to casino gambling.

The department estimates initial costs of additional staff will be more than $1.6 million with ongoing costs of more than $1.2 million, with those moneys paid out of the state gaming fund, again, lowering the amount available to education. However, as noted by the Revenue Department, there is no power for the department to collect those funds from the casinos.

The Missouri Gaming Commission, which told me earlier this year was short 23 people already and is stretched thin just keeping up with contemporary responsibilities, estimates it will need to hire fifteen new people just to regulate sports wagering. The total cost of their salaries, benefits, and expenses is put at almost four million dollars a year and increasing in future years with salary and benefits increases.

Now, let’s do some simple math. The gaming commission estimates it will collect $11.75 million in licensing fees in the first year. Licenses last five years so there would be little or no revenue for the next three years until renewals would produce a new revenue stream.  After the commission takes out its costs, the amendment requires ten percent of the revenues or five-million dollars a year go into the Compulsive Gambling Prevention Fund.

Here’s some more simple math:  The Gaming Commission estimates casino taxable revenues, before any deductions, could total $1,044,684,610.20 in the first five years. That’s Billion.

At ten percent, the state could receive $104,468,461.02 during that time.  If that amount were taxed at the same rate Missouri taxes slot machine and table game revenues (21%), the state would realize $219,383,768.14 before casino deductions allowed in the amendment.

So Cardetti is correct.  Education will get tens of millions of dollars—-$104.5 million in the first five years.   But our schools would receive $219.3 million if sports wagering was taxed at the same rate charged slot machines and table games. To bring this down to a more easily-grasped situation:  If someone were to offer to give you $10,500 if you gave them $21,900, would you take that deal? Supporters of Amendment 2 hope you will.

There is no reason Missourians should accept a ten percent tax on sports wagering. Fourteen states have gaming taxes of more than the proposed ten percent including neighboring states of  Illinois (20-40), Arkansas (13-20), and Nebraska (20). Three states tax sports wagering at 50-51% (Delaware, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island). Pickswise.com says the national average is 19%.

While the commission calculates the $104.5 million in taxes that the state might get in the next five years “may be sufficient to cover the Missouri Gaming commission costs to license and regulate sports wagering,” there is a major caveat.  The calculations “are uncertain based on the inclusion of a deduction for ‘any federal tax’ with no corresponding definition or explanation as to what that would include.”  Such a deduction, and others allowed in the proposal, can significantly cut revenues to the state.

Long story short: “There is concern that the licensing fees will not cover the expenses of the Missouri Gaming Commission…during the years in which licensing fees and renewals are not collected (i.e. years two, three, and four,” says the Revenue Department. On top of that is the failure of the proposal to state where those fees would be deposited.  Also not clear is how that money will be disbursed if and when it is collected and deposited.

The Commission now has no limits on fines for sports wagering operators for violations of the laws and rules.  The proposed amendment limits those penalties. Bad idea, says the commission.  Casinos, of course, think it’s just swell.

And getting back to that $104.5 million for education. The proposition says tax revenue will go to elementary and secondary education only after the Commission takes out its “reasonable expenses” plus another five-million dollars for the gambler’s fund. In years when little or no renewal or licensing fees are collected, the MGC will have to dip into the tax funds that would otherwise go to the schools to pay its bills and to put that five-million dollars aside for the problem gamblers fund—which the gaming commission would oversee, although it thinks the Department of Mental Health would do a better job. So, in years two, three, and four, the tens of millions for education will be reduced by some, or several, tens.

Now, here is the capper.

All of these calculations of state revenues are completely uncertain—

—because this proposition, for the first time, allows casinos to deduct a lot of money from the revenues that are taxed.  So in addition to a sports wagering tax rate that is less than half the rate on other forms of gambling and creates a 25% cut in the overall gambling tax rate, the casinos want voters to approve a system that lessens the amount that can be taxed and, in fact, will allow casinos to pay NO tax, perhaps for months at a time.

If you want to know what that could mean, says the Gaming Commission, look at Kansas.

In February 2023, Kansans wagered more than $194 million in sports bets. The state, however, received $1,134 in state tax revenue due to language permitting operators to deduct free play or promotional credits before assessing their state taxes.  Some operators had not paid any state taxes through the first quarter of 2023 due to the deductions they were permitted to claim.

February, folks.  That’s Super Bowl month when a lot of Missourians (according to the casino industry) went to Kansas to bet.  And the state of Kansas—with provisions similar to those the casinos want to enact in Missouri—was paid only $1,134 dollars in taxes on $194 million in bets.

It could happen here because the proposed amendment allows a casino whose accountants calculate losses for one month to carry over the loss to the next month’s calculations, leading the Commission to conclude, “The totality of the deductions…will result in sports wagering licensees showing negative adjusted gross revenues and therefore paying no sports wagering tax…The carryover provisions…would further impact the ability of the Commission to meet its reasonable expenses and further impact or eliminate contributions to the Compulsive Gambling Fund and education in the state of Missouri.”

Read that again—Provisions of this proposed amendment might NOT put millions into our education system at all.  Instead, they could “impact or eliminate” contributions to our schools.

So—the basic question for the people of Missouri is this: Who is being honest with you?  Is it the Department of Revenue and the Missouri Gaming Commission, or is it an industry that flourishes because its games are guaranteed to take all of your money sooner or later?

And the casinos want to keep it all. The records show that the gaming industry will not leave a penny behind in Missouri that the people and the state do not force it by law—not written by the gaming industry—to leave.

The proposition that the attractive mother and former school teacher wants you to think will be wonderful for our schools is a shell game without a pea.

And believe it or not, this is only part of the story.  There is more.  And it’s equally bad, if not worse—especially if you are a veteran and if your city has a casino in it.

We’ll get to that later.

If you want to read the entire fiscal note, ask the State Auditor’s office to send you fiscal note 24-160.

Some of you might be much more sophisticated mathematicians than I am.  Please let me know if there are unwarranted or even plain erroneous assumptions in any of the statistics quoted here. I would note, however, that they are based on the State Auditor’s fiscal note for Amendment 2. If necessary, corrections will be made in this entry and a future entry will ask readers to go back and note the corrections.

The promise 

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In this campaign year and its awful portents of the future, we are hearing voices, many voices, angry voices, boasting voices, threatening voices, halting voices, frightened voices, quiet hopeful voices almost afraid in today’s climate to speak of hope loudly enough to be heard through the blizzard of accusations and lies and over-emphasized blunders.

Do we believe anymore that this is really a land of promise?  Or is it just a land awash in its own ugliness, self-pity, self-service, and self-defense so deep that the light of optimism cannot  penetrate?

We cannot allow that mood or those who promote it to drag us down.

We must be, as Thomas Wolfe wrote in his 1934 masterpiece You Can’t Go Home Again, “burning in the night.”

We do not know if school children still memorize one paragraph from one chapter in Wolf’s book. It concludes Chapter 31, which begins cynically but tells us we cannot let cynicism corrupt our hope.  Here is an excerpt lightly edited for shortness but still long:

The desire for fame is rooted in the hearts of men. It is one of the most powerful of all human desires, and perhaps for that very reason, and because it is so deep and secret, it is the desire that men are most unwilling to admit, particularly those who feel most sharply its keen and piercing spur.

The politician, for example, would never have us think that it is love of office, the desire for the notorious elevation of public place, that drives him on. No, the thing that governs him is his pure devotion to the common weal, his selfless and high-minded statesmanship, his love of his fellow man, and his burning idealism to turn out the rascal who usurps the office and betrays the public trust which he himself, as he assures us, would so gloriously and devotedly maintain…

So, too, the soldier. It is never love of glory that inspires him to his profession. It is never love of battle, love of war, love of all the resounding titles and the proud emoluments of the heroic conqueror. Oh, no. It is devotion to duty that makes him a soldier. There is no personal motive in it. He is inspired simply by the selfless ardor of his patriotic abnegation. He regrets that he has but one life to give for his country.

So it goes through every walk of life…

All these people lie, of course. They know they lie, and everyone who hears them also knows they lie. The lie, however, has become a part of the convention of American life…  Is it not strange that, feeling only an amused and pitying contempt for those who are still naïve enough to long for glory, we should yet lacerate our souls, poison our minds and hearts, and crucify our spirits with bitter and rancorous hatred against those who are fortunate enough to achieve fame?

…And we? Made of our father’s earth, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh—born like our father here to live and strive, here to win through or be defeated—here, like all the other men who went before us, not too nice or dainty for the uses of this earth—here to live, to suffer, and to die—O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning, burning in the night.

Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.

There where the hackles of the Rocky Mountains blaze in the blank and naked radiance of the moon, go make your resting stool upon the highest peak. Can you not see us now? The continental wall juts sheer and flat, its huge black shadow on the plain, and the plain sweeps out against the East, two thousand miles away. The great snake that you see there is the Mississippi River.

Behold the gem-strung towns and cities of the good, green East, flung like star-dust through the field of night. That spreading constellation to the north is called Chicago… Beyond, close-set and dense as a clenched fist, are all the jeweled cities of the eastern seaboard. There’s Boston, ringed with the bracelet of its shining little towns, and all the lights that sparkle on the rocky indentations of New England. Here, southward and a little to the west, and yet still coasted to the sea, is our intensest ray, the splintered firmament of the towered island of Manhattan. Round about her, sown thick as grain, is the glitter of a hundred towns and cities. The long chain of lights there is the necklace of Long Island and the Jersey shore. Southward and inland, by a foot or two, behold the duller glare of Philadelphia. Southward further still, the twin constellations—Baltimore and Washington. Westward, but still within the borders of the good, green East, that nighttime glow and smolder of hell-fire is Pittsburgh. Here, St. Louis, hot and humid in the cornfield belly of the land, and bedded on the mid-length coil and fringes of the snake. There at the snake’s mouth, southward six hundred miles or so, you see the jeweled crescent of old New Orleans. Here, west and south again, you see the gemmy glitter of the cities on the Texas border.

Turn now, seeker, on your resting stool atop the Rocky Mountains, and look another thousand miles or so across moon-blazing fiend-worlds of the Painted Desert and beyond Sierras’ ridge. That magic congeries of lights there to the west, ringed like a studded belt around the magic setting of its lovely harbor, is the fabled town of San Francisco. Below it, Los Angeles and all the cities of the California shore. A thousand miles to north and west, the sparkling towns of Oregon and Washington.

Observe the whole of it, survey it as you might survey a field. Make it your garden, seeker, or your backyard patch. Be at ease in it. It’s your oyster—yours to open if you will. Don’t be frightened, it’s not so big now, when your footstool is the Rocky Mountains. Reach out and dip a hatful of cold water from Lake Michigan. Drink it—we’ve tried it—you’ll not find it bad. Take your shoes off and work your toes down in the river oozes of the Mississippi bottom—it’s very refreshing on a hot night in the summertime. Help yourself to a bunch of Concord grapes up there in northern New York State—they’re getting good now. Or raid that watermelon patch down there in Georgia. Or, if you like, you can try the Rockyfords here at your elbow, in Colorado. Just make yourself at home, refresh yourself, get the feel of things, adjust your sights, and get the scale. It’s your pasture now, and it’s not so big—only three thousand miles from east to west, only two thousand miles from north to south—but all between, where ten thousand points of light prick out the cities, towns, and villages, there, seeker, you will find us burning in the night.

Here, as you pass through the brutal sprawl, the twenty miles of rails and rickets, of the South Chicago slums—here, in an unpainted shack, is a Negro boy, and, seeker, he is burning in the night. Behind him is a memory of the cotton fields, the flat and mournful pineland barrens of the lost and buried South, and at the fringes of the pine another nigger shack, with mammy and eleven little niggers. Farther still behind, the slave-driver’s whip, the slave ship, and, far off, the jungle dirge of Africa. And before him, what? A roped-in ring, a blaze of lights, across from him a white champion; the bell, the opening, and all around the vast sea-roaring of the crowd. Then the lightning feint and stroke, the black panther’s paw—the hot, rotating presses, and the rivers of sheeted print! O seeker, where is the slave ship now?

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory today. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-baked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound’s; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher’s mitt, the umpire’s thumb jerked upward, the clean strike.

Or there again, in the East-Side Ghetto of Manhattan, two blocks away from the East River, a block away from the gas-house district and its thuggery, there in the swarming tenement, shut in his sweltering cell, breathing the sun-baked air through opened window at the fire escape, celled there away into a little semblance of privacy and solitude from all the brawling and vociferous life and argument of his family and the seething hive around him, the Jew boy sits and pores upon his book. In shirt-sleeves, bent above his table to meet the hard glare of a naked bulb, he sits with gaunt, starved face converging to his huge beaked nose, the weak eyes squinting painfully through his thick-lens glasses, his greasy hair roached back in oily scrolls above the slanting cage of his painful and constricted brow. And for what? For what this agony of concentration? For what this hell of effort? For what this intense withdrawal from the poverty and squalor of dirty brick and rusty fire escapes, from the raucous cries and violence and never-ending noise? For what?

Because, brother, he is burning in the night. He sees the class, the lecture room, the shining apparatus of gigantic laboratories, the open field of scholarship and pure research, certain knowledge, and the world distinction of an Einstein name.

So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this, seeker, is the promise of America.

                                           ——-

We had to memorize that. I think it was in the fifth or sixth grade.  The masculine and some cultural references in it have become antiquated, but the ideal it expresses remains vital and probably is one of the reasons we refuse to be defeated by our present national darkness—because we remember the light of an earlier generation that called for us to be better, to reach higher, to see each other as equals, and to live the promise of America.

We must burn in the night.

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Who Will be Next?

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The fish are in the barrel.

The kids are back in school.

—and in Winder, Georgia a few days ago, a 14-year old boy with a gun went fish hunting.  He killed four.

It’s the 45th school shooting this year, the 385th mass shooting in the United States.

Newsweek has counted 2,034 school shootings in this country since 2004. California has had the most, 169. Texas has had 141, to rank second. In today’s culture, these numbers should not be unexpected; they’re our two most populous states.

A few days ago—September 7—the Associated Press reported the Georgia incident was the 30th mass shooting of 2024, producing 131 deaths. Four or more people have to die to be considered a “mass shooting” as compiled by the AP and USA Today, working in conjunction with Northeastern University. Last year was one of the deadliest on record, 42 incidents, 217 deaths..

It might surprise some people to hear someone such as Jennifer Briemann say it’s time to take school security seriously. Briemann is the Deputy Director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action. But she also tells Newsweek “The reality is that the proposals put forth by those who wish to disarm law-abiding citizens would not have prevented this senseless tragedy in Georgia.”

The rhetoric remains unchanged. So do the school shootings. There is a place for reasonable, pragmatic discussions—but they can’t happen as long as the political parties talk at each other instead of to each other.

A six-year-old video has re-emerged in the wake of the latest killings. It is an example of ongoing political unwillingness to confront this issue, the tendency to divert attention away from it, and the tendency to hide behind an illogical argument.

On March 24, 2018, Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, whose critics consider her one of the nuttier members of Congress, decided to drive to Carbondale, Colorado where students were taking part in the national March for Our Lives in the wake of the 17-death school shooting in Parkland Florida. She apparently Facebooked as she drove and she said:

“So, I am on my way to Carbondale Colorado. There’s supposedly an organized march. The March for Our Lives is going to take place and I’m really interested to see if people know what they’re marching for.  I guess this is supposed to be the beginning of people speaking out to take away our Second Amendment Rights, and I’m not happy about it.  If this is really a March for Our Lives, let’s march against abortion, because I was looking at statistics and there are nearly one million abortions per year in America. One million!  Do you know how many gun violence deaths there are, gun related deaths there are in America, per year?  15,000. Hmmm.  A drop in a bucket, I’d say.  So, I left Rifle, Colorado; I’m not going into Shooters right now. I’m going to Carbondale and I’m going to see what these people really believe, if they know what they’re marching for. If they know that they are marching against their rights.  They’re marching, saying, “Hey, I have a right that I don’t want. Take it away from me. Get rid of this. (she is smiling as she makes these comments, by the way.) I want the people around me to not be able to protect themselves, to not be able to defend me.” I’m not—you know, I’m driving here, I think it’s kind of similar to talking on speaker phone so I guess I’m safe. But, I was thinking, my government requires me to wear this (shows her seat belt). I have to wear them to protect myself. And I can’t have my 9 millimeter to protect myself?  I don’t think so. I don’t think so, not today, no. (laughs).

She apparently though herself humorous for talking about the town of Rifle (a nice place on I-70 in the Rockies) and Shooters, the sports bar, in her soliloquy in which she ignored any of the humanity behind the demonstrations, showed no awareness of any of the pathos so many felt and were feeling, and offered nothing of comfort to the affected or a cure for the problems that compound the school shootings other than seemingly suggest that everybody should have a 9 mm pistol.

She was driving and glancing at her cell phone during the presentation, unaware that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated almost 44,000 people died in traffic crashes last year.

They’re just bigger drops in the bucket. The agency thinks more than 13,500 of those fatalities were alcohol-related.  Eh.  If it’s not an aborted baby, these deaths seem to be insignificant to her.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 3,000 of the 44,000 people who die in traffic crashes each year die because of distracted driving. Maybe they’re just mist in the bucket to her.

If those are just drops, how would she rate the World Health Organization’s estimate that eight-million people a year die because of tobacco-related issues.  The CDC says more than 480,000 deaths a year result from cigarette smoking—almost sixty years after the first warnings appeared on cigarette packages by federal mandate. More drops.

The National Center for Health Statistics estimated 49,476 people committed suicide in the United States in 2022.  Of those, 27,032 used firearms.

Drip, drip, drip.

Every one of those deaths, whether by traffic crash, smoking, or suicide is a tragedy to somebody. As is an abortion. But she seems to be saying that abortion is her only concern.

For one thing, her “15,000” gun related deaths are pretty low. But looking for ways to minimize those deaths is too insignificant for her to worry about.

As for the seat belt—It’s a government mandate that reduces the chance of death or injury, not just for her but for others riding with her or in the other vehicle.

Comparing a seatbelt to a gun is over the top. Seat belts protect those who should not be driving as well as those who have no restrictions. There are few mandates that affect people who should not have guns. Instead, her argument seems to be that if everybody had a 9-millimeter gun, they’d be safe.

Yeah. Right.  The students and the teachers in Georgia or in Parkland, Florida in 2018 or at any of the other mass-shooting sites in the last few decades would have had the presence of mind and the time to draw their Glocks from their holsters, backpacks, or desk drawers when someone walked into their rooms and immediately started shooting that the shootings would not have happened?

The students and others who were marching in Colorado, D.C., and other places that day were not saying they wanted to eliminate a right—the Second Amendment.  They were saying THEY have a right, too.  And if Boebert and other pro-life, pro-gun zealots don’t see the hypocrisy of the overlaps of the two issues and quit bloviating about the exclusivity of both, more fish in more barrels will be shot.

The right to life and the right to live are separate issues.  Policy makers who strain to put them together solve nothing and avoid arriving at responsible difficult answers.  There is shame in the repetition of that pattern.

And that is why more children will become fishes in barrels this year.

The school year is still young. Who will be the next fish in the next barrel while nothing is done by those who know a 9 millimeter pistol is not the real answer?

Just the Facts. Part Two 

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The Democrats wrapped up last week the most creative and glitzy convention we can recall—by far. It was a convention in which the delegates seemed genuinely to be having fun that transcended the usual partisan enjoyment of a convention.

Monday, we relied on CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale and his staff, who evaluated the presidential debate in July, to point out the untruths that were spoken each night of the Republican National Convention.

Today we look at the work done by Dale and his staff in evaluating the Democratic National Convention. This entry will be shorter than Monday’s entry, not because there were no untruths of various degrees spoken at the DNC—-because there were—-but because there were fewer of them during the DNC, in good part because the Democrats have no match for the one-person nonstop generator of nonstop lies that the Republicans had.

But we are posting these evaluations because the personal discussions we have with others in the 70 days or so before the election are likely to rely on what was said during the political conventions.

Again, we offer these entries because words are cheap on both sides, because political commercials are more manipulative than they are honest, and because we hope this can be a reference for you in stating our own statements honestly and questioning honestly the statements of others.

And once again we remind you that The Washington Post and FactCheck.org (which is based at the Annenberg School for Communication Trust at the University of Pennsylvania), Politifact (part of the Poynter Institute which has a truth-o-meter than goes from zero to “Pants on Fire”), The Associated Press which has a webpage at Fact Check: Political & News Fact  Check, are among other fact checkers not only for politics but in some cases for other issues.

DEMOCRATS, FIRST NIGHT:

Democratic state and federal officeholders, including President Joe Biden, delivered some false, misleading or lacking-key-context claims on the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday.

Biden repeated misleading claims he has made in previous speeches about billionaires’ tax rates and foreign trade. He also overstated the extent to which his efforts to fight climate change are expected to reduce US carbon emissions in the next decade. He made an outdated claim about the number of Americans with health insurance. And he omitted key context about his administration’s infrastructure-building efforts, framing distant goals as if they were already achievements.

Speaking earlier in the night, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois denounced former President Donald Trump for having presided over a loss of jobs without mentioning the critical context that the losses occurred because of the Covid-19 pandemic that caused a global economic crash. A video played at the convention similarly left out important context on the respective job-related records of the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations.

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow falsely claimed that the Supreme Court has made Trump “completely immune from prosecution,” significantly overstating the court’s recent ruling.

And Rep. Robert Garcia of California misleadingly described Trump’s widely criticized 2020 comments about the possibility of scientists studying the use of injected disinfectant as a Covid-19 treatment, wrongly saying Trump had instructed Americans to inject bleach.

Here is a CNN fact check of these claims and some other remarks made on Monday.

Biden on taxing billionaires

During his speech, Biden asked the audience if they knew what the average billionaire in the United States pays in taxes.

“We have a thousand billionaires in America. You know what the average tax rate they pay? 8.2%,” Biden said.

Facts First: Biden used this figure in a way that was misleading. As in previous remarks, including his State of the Union address in March, Biden didn’t explain that the figure is the product of an alternative calculation, from economists in his own administration, that factors in unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the alternative calculation itself; the administration economists who came up with it explained it in detail on the White House website in 2021. Biden, however, has tended to cite the figure without any context about what it is and isn’t, leaving open the impression that he was talking about what these billionaires pay under current law.

So, what do billionaires actually pay under current law? The answer is not publicly known, but experts say it’s clearly more than 8%.

“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in 2023. Gleckman said that in 2019, University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman “estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23% in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24% for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3,” numbers Biden has used in some previous speeches, “or even 8%.”

In February 2024, Gleckman provided additional calculations from the Tax Policy Center. The center found that the top 0.1% of households paid an average effective federal tax rate of about 30.3% in 2020, including an average income tax rate of 24.3%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Biden on carbon emissions

Speaking about his achievements on climate, Biden said his agenda made possible “cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030.”

Facts First: Independent analysis shows the US is off-track to meet an ambitious goal Biden set early in his administration of slashing US carbon emissions in half by 2030 – even with his climate law.

Biden’s climate target of cutting emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels (2005 was the historical peak for US carbon emissions) by 2030 was always going to be a tough goal to achieve. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, analysis suggested it would get the US most of the way toward its goal – about a 40% reduction in carbon emissions. The thinking was that regulations from agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency would help make up the rest of the goal.

But a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group found that the US isn’t on track to hit Biden’s goal of slashing US emissions in half by 2030. Rhodium estimates the US is currently on track to reduce emissions anywhere from 32-43% by that date. However, the report says the US could surpass Biden’s goal by 2035 if there are no major changes to current policies, finding that the US would likely pick up the pace of decarbonizing its transportation, power and heavy industry sectors in the 2030s compared to the 2020s.

One big impediment to Biden’s goal is the fact that the EPA’s marquee climate rules regulating emissions from vehicles and power plants are facing an onslaught of legal challenges and a skeptical US Supreme Court. And an even bigger question mark is the 2024 election and whether Biden will be replaced by another Democrat with similar climate ambitions or former President Donald Trump – who has vowed to reverse much of Biden’s climate agenda.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Biden’s claim about removing lead pipes from schools and homes

Biden, speaking about his bipartisan infrastructure law, said: “We’re removing every lead pipe from schools and homes, so every child can drink clean water.”

Facts First: This claim needs context. While the administration is spending $15 billion and working on federal regulations to remove all lead pipes from public drinking water systems over a decade, they may not be able to replace all pipes and service lines on private properties.

Lead drinking pipes can be found all over the country; some national estimates say the total number of lead service lines is around 9.2 million. Lead in drinking water is a major health concern for babies and young children, and Biden has made eradicating it a major priority. The Biden EPA proposed a major rule that, if finalized, would compel water utilities to gradually get rid of 100% of their lead pipes and service lines over 10 years.

The EPA estimates this effort will cost utilities $20 billion to $30 billion over that decade; $15 billion of that could be covered by the bipartisan infrastructure law, and there is an additional $11.7 billion available through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund that could be used for lead removal as well. Cities with lead pipes, including New Orleans, are currently trying to locate all of their lead pipes.

Besides funding, the other issue is the EPA rule as currently proposed doesn’t cover lead pipes or service lines on private property. Replacing these smaller pipes on private property that go into homes could present an even more complex and costly challenge. Though the Biden initiative will make a major dent in replacing the country’s lead pipes, it’s unlikely to be able to replace every single one on both private and public property.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Biden’s claim about trade ignores widening deficit under his presidency

In his speech, Biden said, “We used to import products and export jobs. Now we export American products and create American jobs right here in America.”

Fact First: This claim is misleading. So far this year, the United States has imported more goods than it has exported, leading to a seasonally adjusted trade deficit of more than $567 billion, according to figures from the US Census Bureau. 

In fact, the goods trade deficit has widened since Biden took office. In 2020, the nation’s goods trade deficit was $901 billion. After Biden’s first year in office, it increased to over $1 trillion and has stayed above that threshold every subsequent year.

The dollar’s strength has played a role in widening the goods trade deficit, making it more expensive for other countries to buy US-produced goods, and at the same time, cheaper for Americans to buy goods abroad.

From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald 

Biden on building electric vehicle charging stations

Speaking about his administration’s goal to create more clean energy jobs, Biden said IBEW workers were at work “installing 500,000 charging stations all across America” to power electric vehicles.

Facts First: This is more of a promise than a fact, but even so, it needs context. For a few reasons, it’s questionable whether the Biden administration will be able to meet its goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations on US roads.

Installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations has long been one of Biden’s goals. The president initially proposed Congress spend $15 billion to make it a reality, but just half of that – $7.5 billion – passed as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The latest data from the Department of Energy shows the United States is still a long way from that goal; there are currently more than 180,000 EV charging ports operating at over 66,000 station locations around the US.

Though the administration has said that could be backfilled by private investment, that change in funding could hinder the administration’s ability to meet the goal. The federal government has spent the last few years sending money to states; states can now unlock more than $900 million in funding for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, which the administration estimated will “help build” chargers across approximately 53,000 miles of US highways.

Over the next five years, the full $5 billion will be spent to build out a network of EV chargers on major highways. Another pot of $2.5 billion in grant funding is also available for states to apply to; in January, $623 million in grant funding went out the door to help counties, cities and tribes around the nation install new charging stations for electric vehicles and long-haul freight trucks.

But it’s been slow going. States are still in the process of selecting companies to actually build the charging stations, meaning it could still take months or even years to fully see the impact of the money around the nation.

There is also a wide range in how much different types of chargers cost, and individual states have a lot of leeway in deciding what kinds of chargers will go on their roads. DC fast chargers can charge a car to mostly full in 20 minutes to an hour and are meant to go on major highways and roads. Another kind of charger known as an L2 charger can take hours to charge a car to full. But DC fast chargers are much more expensive, costing around $100,000 compared to around $6,000 for an L2, Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior resident fellow at the think tank Third Way, has told CNN.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen 

Biden on number of people with health insurance

Biden touted his achievements in expanding health insurance coverage to more Americans.

“More Americans have health insurance today than ever before in American history,” he said at the Democratic National Convention.

Facts First: Biden’s claim is outdated. While it’s true that health insurance coverage hit a record high last year, fewer people were insured in the first quarter of this year than in the spring of last year – in large part because a federal law that prevented states from winnowing their Medicaid rolls lapsed last year.

Some 130 million Americans had public health insurance coverage, such as Medicare or Medicaid, in the first quarter of this year, but that’s down from nearly 138 million people in the second quarter of last year, according to the latest National Health Interview Survey. The loss outpaces the gain of just under 3 million people in private health insurance plans. (A small number of people have both types of coverage.)

At the same time, the number of uninsured Americans rose to 27.1 million in the first quarter of this year, up from 23.7 million people in the spring of 2023. That pushed the uninsured rate up to 8.2%, from 7.2%, over that time period.

One main reason why health insurance coverage hit a record high last year was because of a Covid-19 pandemic relief provision that barred states from involuntarily disenrolling residents whom they deemed no longer qualify in exchange for enhanced federal funding. That prohibition was lifted in April 2023.

Only 81.7 million people were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program this past April, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That compares to 93.9 million people in March 2023, before the provision lapsed.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Biden claims Trump will do “everything to ban abortion nationwide”

Biden said Monday that “Trump will do everything to ban abortion nationwide. Oh, he will.”

Facts First: Biden is making a prediction that we cannot definitively fact check, but the claim does not reflect Trump’s most recent comments on abortion and needs context.

While Trump regularly boasts that he played a key role in getting the US Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed abortion rights across the country, Trump says it should be up to the states to decide how and when to restrict abortion. Polls show that the majority of Americans are against a federal abortion ban.

Throughout this most recent campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly ducked direct questions about his support for a federal ban on abortions, but he said in April that he would not sign a national abortion ban if elected to the White House again. That statement reversed what he said in 2016 when he was first running for the presidency and was the opposite of statements he made throughout his time in office.

Some scholars are concerned that conservative advisers to Trump have encouraged him to ban abortions by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, a method that could essentially create a federal ban without Trump needing to sign any legislation to do it.

The Victorian-era anti-vice law that is still on the books is not currently enforced. The law bans the mailing of “obscene” materials used to produce an abortion. Some scholars believe Trump could use the Justice Department to enforce a ban that would not just restrict people from sending the medication currently used in the majority of abortions through the mail, but would ban any kind of materials used to produce any kind of abortion.

Trump has not officially endorsed the enforcement of the Comstock Act, but it is a strategy some of his advisers have outlined as an option for Trump to restrict abortions nationwide.

From CNN’s Jen Christensen

California congressman’s misleading claim about Trump’s comments about Covid-19 and disinfectant

Garcia claimed, among other things, that Trump “told us to inject bleach into our bodies,” while criticizing Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Facts First: Garcia’s claim is misleading. Trump never portrayed his ill-informed 2020 musings about the possibility of using disinfectant to treat Covid-19 as actual advice to Americans. Rather, Trump was talking about the possibility of scientists testing the possibility of using disinfectant as a treatment.

During a press briefing in April 2020, Trump expressed interest in scientists exploring the possibility of whether Covid-19 could be treated using disinfectants inside people’s bodies, “by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” or by deploying powerful light “inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.” Trump’s comments were slammed by medical experts as highly dangerous, and they prompted urgent warnings from public health authorities and companies that sell household disinfectants. But he never actually said he was suggesting citizens go and use such products.

Trump made the ill-informed remarks after Bill Bryan, the acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, outlined tests in which he said sunlight or disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the coronavirus on surfaces and in saliva.

When Trump jumped shortly afterward to the dangerous idea of injecting disinfectants inside people’s bodies, he was talking about experts somehow testing that idea. He said: “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Durbin’s missing context on Trump’s jobs record

Durbin of Illinois, the Senate Majority Whip, claimed of Trump: “He lost millions of jobs in America.” Durbin said shortly after that, “He is one of only two presidents in the history of the United States to leave office with fewer Americans working than when he started.”

Facts First: Durbin’s statistics are correct, but he left out some critical context about them. While there was a net loss of about 2.7 million jobs from the beginning of Trump’s four-year term to the end, there was a net gain of about 6.7 million jobs under Trump until the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country about three years into his term.  

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March 2020 and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. The US then started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million from May 2020 through December 2020, but not enough to make up for the massive early-pandemic losses.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Beatty’s claim about the Biden administration’s expansion of the child tax credit

Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty praised the Biden administration’s efforts to provide larger tax credits for families and lift more children out of poverty.

“Joe and Kamala have been expanding the child tax credit, and let me just tell you … cutting the poverty rate for our children,” she said.

Facts First: Beatty’s claim needs context. It’s true that the expanded child tax credit passed early in the Biden administration slashed the child poverty rate in 2021, but the benefit only lasted for the one year the temporary enhancement was in effect. Child poverty increased in 2022 to a rate roughly comparable to where it was in 2019.

The American Rescue Plan Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress in March 2021, increased the size of the child tax credit to up to $3,600 – from $2,000 – for eligible families, enabled many more low-income parents to claim it and distributed half of it on a monthly basis.

That helped send child poverty – as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure – to a record low 5.2% in 2021, a drop of 46% from 2020, when the rate was 9.7% according to the US Census Bureau. The child tax credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, with the temporary enhancement accounting for 2.1 million of those kids, according to the Census Bureau.

The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which began in 2009, takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses.

But in 2022, child poverty soared to 12.4%, roughly comparable to where it was prior to the pandemic in 2019. It was the largest jump in child poverty since the Supplemental Poverty Measure began.

Earlier this year, the House passed a tax bill that would again expand the child tax credit temporarily, though the boost would not be as generous as it was in 2021. Senate Republicans blocked it from advancing in their chamber earlier this month.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Harris campaign video showcasing Trump’s ‘lies’ on the economy misses context

In a prerecorded video from Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team, a staffer shared claims Trump has made about the economy seeking to disprove them.

“Let’s take a look at his track record on jobs before Covid, as compared to the Biden-Harris administration. What do you know? Hardly the most successful ever,” the staffer said as a screen displayed average monthly job gains under Trump from January 2017 to February 2020 compared to average monthly gains during the entire Biden-Harris administration.

“And about his supposed manufacturing miracle, Trump talked a big game, but actually lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs. And just to be clear, it wasn’t just Covid here either. Manufacturing jobs were already on their way down before the pandemic.”

Facts First: The numbers the campaign staffer shared are correct, but they lack crucial context. It’s unfair to compare the average monthly job gains Trump achieved up until March 2020 to that of the Biden-Harris administration. That’s because the average monthly gains achieved under their administration were propped up by some of the gangbuster job reports that came just as the economy was recovering from the pandemic. For instance, in July 2021, 939,000 jobs were added in just one month.

And while it’s true 178,000 manufacturing jobs were lost when Trump was president, Covid-19 did in fact play a big role. In the immediate months before the pandemic, manufacturing jobs were declining very slightly. From November 2019 to February 2020, 36,000 manufacturing jobs were lost. That hardly compares to the roughly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs lost from February 2020 to April 2020. That so many of those job losses were able to be recouped by the time Trump left office is noteworthy.

From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald

Rodriguez’s claim on Trump wanting to terminate the Affordable Care Act

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez on Monday accused Trump of still wanting to kill the Affordable Care Act.

“Now, Trump is promising to terminate the Affordable Care Act,” Rodriguez said at the DNC.

Facts First: Rodriguez’s claim does not reflect Trump’s recent comments on the Affordable Care Act. He did appear to express renewed support for terminating the law in one social media post late last year, but he has since said he wants to improve it, not terminate it.  Most recently, he has said he will keep the law unless he can come up with an unspecified “better” plan.

Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act was one of Trump’s top priorities in his 2016 presidential campaign and first term. However, even though Republicans controlled Congress and the White House the following year, they failed to unite behind a plan to do so, ending any serious attempts to completely overhaul the landmark health reform law, popularly known as Obamacare.

The former president revived the debate over the law’s fate in November 2023, when he wrote on his Truth Social platform that he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” and that the failure to terminate it “was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”

Trump quickly walked back his comments, posting a few days later that he doesn’t “want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!”

In April, Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social: “I’m not running to terminate the ACA as crooked Joe Biden says all over the place. We’re going to make the ACA much better than it is right now and much less expensive for you.”

And at a North Carolina rally last week, he said: “(Vice President Kamala Harris) goes around saying, ‘Oh, he’s going to get rid of the health.’ No, no, I’m going to keep it unless we can come up with something that’s better for you and less expensive for you. Otherwise, we’re not doing it.”

However, Trump has yet to release a proposal on how he would make the Affordable Care Act better and less expensive.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Michigan state senator makes false claim about Trump immunity

During a speech at the DNC about Project 2025, McMorrow said that the conservative blueprint for a second Trump term aimed to greatly expand the power of the presidency “like no president has ever had or should ever have.”

The Democratic lawmaker went on to say that if anyone wondered if those potential new powers were legal, “Thanks to Donald Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court, he’s now completely immune from prosecution – even if he breaks the law.”

Facts First: McMorrow’s comment about the case Trump v. US is false. In their decision last month in the historic case, the six conservative justices granted Trump some immunity from prosecution, but not blanket immunity, as the former president had sought. The court said Trump could not be criminally pursued over “official acts,” but that he could face prosecution over alleged criminal actions involving “unofficial acts” taken while in office. 

“The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the conservative majority.

And while Trump appointed three of the justices who helped make up the six-justice majority, the other three, including Roberts, were appointed by previous Republican presidents.

The federal judge in Washington, DC, overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case against Trump must now examine the allegations against the former president to determine which ones are covered by the newly granted immunity.

From CNN’s Devan Cole 

DNC video leaves out context about Trump abortion comment from 2016

A video about abortion rights that was played at the DNC on Monday featured a short clip of former Trump agreeing, in a television interview, that women who get abortions should be punished.

Facts First: The video left out some important context: Trump made this comment more than eight years ago and retracted it hours after he made it. In an interview in April 2024, Trump declined to express an opinion on the idea of a state deciding to punish women for getting an abortion after it is banned, returning to his campaign refrain that abortion policy is now a matter for each state to decide.

Trump made the comment featured in the DNC video at an MSNBC town hall during the Republican presidential primary in 2016. Trump said that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortion. When host Chris Matthews asked, “For the woman?” Trump responded, “Yeah, there has to be some form.” When Matthews pressed further, Trump said he didn’t know what the punishment should be.

Hours later, after facing widespread criticism, Trump issued a statement in which he said women should not be punished for getting abortions.

“If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman,” Trump said in the statement. “The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed – like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.”

The next day on Fox News, Trump said, “It could be that I misspoke” during an abortion discussion he claimed was “convoluted.” He said that “if, in fact, abortion was outlawed, the person performing the abortion, the doctor, or whoever it may be that’s really doing the act is responsible for the act, not the woman, is responsible.”

In an April 2024 interview, Time magazine asked Trump if he is “comfortable if states decide to punish women who access abortions after the procedure is banned,” such as after a 15-week cutoff date. Trump said, “Again, that’s going to be – I don’t have to be comfortable or uncomfortable. The states are going to make that decision. The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale