By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
Most of our patrons do not read the Tuesday entries that focus on sports. We ask that you carefully read this one, however, at least the first part.
(SPORTS WAGERING PETITION)—-Our six major league sports teams have crawled into bed with an industry whose sole characteristic is greed and the people of Missouri could become their abused children.
The teams, fed up that the legislature has failed to legalize sports betting, have launched a petition campaign highly favorable to the casino industry and detrimental to the public to put the issue on the ballot.
It’s a rip-off of major league proportions. The Cardinals, Royals, Chiefs, Blues, and Missouri’s two major league soccer teams are collecting petition signatures to ask voters to let them and our thirteen casinos pocket millions of dollars with a sweetheart tax package that will take millions away from Missouri schools, veterans, and even the host cities of the casinos.
Hidden in the deal is a big tax cut for the casino industry that is made bigger with provisions that lower the amount of money to be taxed.
The petition campaign constitutes nothing less than a mugging of the state of Missouri.
Let’s begin with a simple question. Would you knowingly bet eleven dollars, knowing that the most you ever could win would be TEN dollars?
That is what the teams and the casinos are going to do to Missourians. The state is guaranteed to be a loser with the very first bet. Here is how it will work if voters fall for this scheme:
Missouri’s casinos pay a twenty-one percent tax on revenues remaining after they have paid off winners of bets. So much money is bet in Missouri that the casinos have approached revenues of two-billion dollars in each of the last two years and are on track to equal last year’s record or set a new revenue record for a third straight year.
Simple elementary school mathematics shows how the teams’ casino allies will grow immensely wealthy with this scam while the things that are supposed to be financed with the gambling tax are massively short-changed.
The proposed tax rate on sports betting is only ten percent, eleven percentage points below the rate charged for the last thirty years of casino gambling on table games and slot machines. Thus, the state would give up eleven of the present twenty-one percentage points to get ten
The American Gaming Association’s latest annual report says Missouri would be the twelfth state with a tax of ten percent or less. Fourteen states have tax rates above ten percent or that top out above ten percent, including three states that charge fifty and fifty-one percent. Only five states on the AGA’s chart show rates of less than ten percent.
But there is something dark behind the petition’s demand that the rate be ten percent here.
Ten percent and twenty-one percent produce an average of 15.5 percent, an effective twenty-five percent tax cut for all Missouri casino gambling.
While the teams’ sophisticated advertising campaign will tell voters the proposal wll generate millions of dollars more for the state education fund and for their host cities, the truth is that it will produce less.
Financial analysts who advise the Missouri General Assembly forecast taxable revenes from casino gambing will jump from almost two billion dollars to $2.4 billion within four years. A twenty-one percent tax of that amount would produce $504 million with ninety percent going into funding for elementary and secondary public schools. The other ten percent would be distributed to the thirteen cities that have casinos in them and to one county that shares revenues with the casino city. An average tax of 15.5% would produce $372 million, again with the 90-10 split, $132 million less than if the twenty-one percent tax is maintained.
While $372 million dollars on the low end might seem to be an impressive sum, here is something else the casinos and the sports teams will never tell you in their promotions and advertising:
The Missouri Gaming Commission reports that casinos in the last fiscal year paid gambling taxes of $403.3 million dollars on revenues from slot machines and table games alone.
Approving sports wagering as proposed in the petition will take more than thirty million dollars away from the state, not add revenue.
Our metropolitan areas will feel the difference most acutely. Host communities in the St. Louis metro area, which has four casinos, will lose $5.6 million in the first four years of sports wagering under the petition plan. We wonder if Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III, who has been the spokesman for the teams during legislative committee hearings, has ever thought of what this plan will cost his main ticket-buying community.
Host communities in the Kansas City metro area, also with four casinos, will lose $3.65 million, something we bet the Chiefs and the Royals haven’t considered. .
Our figures are based on projections made by legislative fiscal analysts.
Legislative fiscal analysts forecast the ten percent tax will cost the thirteen host cities more than eleven million dollars, total, in the first four years of wagering, money they would receive if sports wagering were taxed at the same rate as slots and table games. Amazingly, the association that represents those cities doesn’t seem to care. It has endorsed whatever the casinos have asked for from the legislature. One wonders if the city councils or the citizens of those communities has ever heard how much they have lost in the past thirty years because the two-dollar admission never having adjusted for inflation and how much they will lose if the petition passes.
By our calculations, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual inflation calculator, the state already has lost almost $1.1 Billion in admission fees because casinos are paying the same fee they paid when the first two of them opened thirty years ago this year.
In the most recent fiscal year, the state received $57.9 million in admission fees. Had the fees been adjusted annally for inflation, it would have received $113.5 million. But inflation works both ways. The $57.9 million the state did receive had a purchasing power of only $29.5 millon because of the loss of purchasing power of the two 1993 dollars. Remember, half of the two-dollar admission fee goes to the host cities. But their association doesn’t seem to care.
And it’s worse.
Buried within the petition are six deductions not allowed in today’s law that will reduce taxable income by several millions of dollars. The deductions encourage casino bookeepers to try to show their casino produced a monthly loss on paper. If they can, the schools, home dock cities and other state entities listed as beneficiaries of this new form of gambling will receive zero revenues that month.
But it’s far worse than that.
If a casino can show that it had a paper loss for a month, the amount it claims as loss will carry over to the next month and be used to calculate that month’s profit or loss, again reducing the casino’s tax payments. Can anyone name any other business or industry in Missouri that is allowed to calculate their taxes this way?
Two states provide scary examples of the dangers of the carryovers for Missourians to consider. In November, 2022, Louisiana casinos reported a statewide loss of $25.6 milllion because some of the casinos took bets made by a Texas furniture store owner that the Texas Rangers would win the World Series, which they did. In the same month, Maryland casinos reported a statewide loss of $33.6 million after they spent more than $60 million in promotional credits as part of the state’s launch of mobile betting.
But it’s far worse than that.
Let’s go back to the admission fee. Casinos also pay the state a two-dollar admission fee for each person who goes through the turnstiles to the gambling floors. If the gamblers stay longer than two hours, the casino pays another two dollars—a policy that began on the first day that casinos opened thirty years ago this year when they actually were boats and river cruises actually were possible.
A prediction was made at the East Coast Gaming Conference in 2019, a few months after sports betting was legalized by the U. S. Supreme Court, that within five to ten years, ninety percent of sports wagers would be placed online. Just two years later, gambling analyst Larry Henry reported on Casino.org that more than eighty percent of sports bets already were being placed online and New Jersey, the first state to legalize sports betting after the court ruling, 92 percent of sports wagers had been placed online in 2021.
If Missouri follows national trends, ninety percent of sports bets soon will be online and not made by people who go through the turnstiles of our casinos. Under the petition, those online bets will produce zero revenue for programs and services whose budgets have suffered greatly because turnstile admissions have declined by about forty-seven percent in the last twelve years.
Who is suffering the most? The Veterans Commission Capital Trust Fund, which provides money for veterans nursing homes. Admission fee funding of care for our veterans has dropped by 63 percent in the last decade. Nothing in the petition does anything to reverse that trend.
The Missouri Gaming Commission’s budget has declined by more than twenty percent in the last decade. It has twenty-three fewer employees than it had then. And it is facing a major increase in enforcement responsibility if the petition passes. The commission will collect some licensing fees but the petition also requires it to use some of its new money to pay for a problem gambler’s assistance fund.
Numerous studies have indicated gambling addiction will at least triple with the introduction of sports wagering and remote betting. The money to be set aside for “compulsive gambing prevention” comes out of the commission’s pocket. It comes out of the taxes benefitting schools and home dock cities and fees going to the gaming commission. Nothing in the petition requires the casinos or the teams to contribute directly to a fund to counter the problems their new form of gambling will create.
And two more things before we go.
The casino industry has spent a lot of time and resources trying to convince your legislators and mine that sports wagering is a stand-alone issue that need special care and feeding. It is not. Their own bills just add “sports wagering” to the list of games of skill in our state laws. In the now-seven years that sports wagering bills have been introduced, not one has said anything that defines sports wagering as differing from poker, blackjack, craps, or any other table game or slot machine. A bet is a bet is a bet. And if you bet long enough the casino will have all of your money whether you bet on the spin of a wheel, the fall of a card, the roll of a die, or the pull of a lever.
The committee backing the petition campaign says sports wagering will provide new good-paying jobs.
Will it generate enough new jobs to replace the 5,600 people laid off in the host cities during the last fifteen years? Will it replace the $100 million-plus in payrolls lost each year by the host cities in that same period?
Everybody loses except the teams and the casinos in this petition campaign. People going into casinos know they’re playing on tables tilted against them. That’s fine. But before Missourians support this blatant deception against our state by the casinos and our sports teams, they should look at how much they will lose regardless of whether they gamble.
The casinos have never dealt the top card on the deck to the legislature while trying to convince it to approve sports wagering. Now they, with their sports team bedmates, are doing the same with the general public.
The legislature could fix all of this during this session. But don’t expect it to. There are 197 state representatives and senators in our General Assembly. The Associated Press has reported that casinos, sports teams, online sports betting companies, and video gaming terminal inerests have hired about eighty lobbyists to pressure the people we presume represent us into representing those interests instead. That’s one lobbyist for ever 2.5 members of our legislature. It is hard to grow a backbone and do what is right on this issue when you are surrounded by lobbyists backed by interests with bottomless checking accounts and a willingness to support re-election bids or to support opponents for those with the courage to reject the ongoing mugging of Missouri.
The only recourse Missourians will have if this petition gets enough signatures to be on the ballot later this year is to vote it down. If they fail to do so, their state will be a big loser.
(All of the statistics used in this entry are drawn from the annual reports of the Missouri Gaming Commission, the American Gaming Association, legislative staff fiscal notes for pro-casino legislation, and the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We never have seen the homework the casinos to justify the claims they have made in the past or the present).
Now, we take a look at the history behind a cold football game, a cold-shooting basketball team, and the latest from baseball’s hot stove league)
(CHIEFS)—The regular season wasn’t pretty for the Kansas City Chiefs but they looked almost as solid as the frozen field at Arrowhead Stadium Saturday night with their dominating 26-7 wild card playoff win over the Miami Dolphins, a team that hasn’t won in forever in cold weather.
The game goes into the record books as the fourth-coldest game in NFL history. Here’s where it fits in:
December 31, 1967 Lambeau Field, Green Bay comes from behind to beat Dallas 21-17 on the famous Bart Starr quarterback sneak behind center Ken Bowman and Right Guard Jerry Kramer who pushed Defensive Tackle Jethro Pugh aside just enough for Starr to cross the line. Temperatur at the start of the game: -13. Wind Chill -48. The game was dubbed “The Ice Bowl.” Green Bay went on to defeat the Oakland Raiders 33-10 in Super Bowl II.
January 10, 1982 “The Freezer Bowl” Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati. Coach Forrest Gregg, who played in “The Ice Bowl” is now the coach of the Bengals, who beat the San Diego Chargers 27-7. San Diego’s only touchdown was scored by former Missouri Tiger Kellen Winslow. Game time temperature: -9 Wind Chill -59. Some of the players in this game, as in the Green Bay-Dallas game reported health problems for the rest of their lives because of the playing conditions.
January 10, 2016 TCF Bank Stadium, Minneapolis. Seattle beats the Vikings 10-9 when Bill Walsh’s field goal attempt goes wide left with 22 seconds on the clock. Minus-6 with a windchilll of minus-25.
January 13, 2024 Arrowhead Stadium, Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins in the southernmost NFL cold game on record, 26-7. Harrison Butker’s four field goals and two extra points outscore the Dolphins, who lost their eighth straight game played in below-freezing temperatures. Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa dropped to 0-5 in games played below 45 degrees. Game time temperature: -4 Windchill -20. At the end it was -9 and -28. The extreme cold sent 69 people to aid tents run by the city fire department. About half were for hypothermia symptoms and fifteen people were taken to hospitals where seven were suffering from hypothermia, three for frostbite and five for various other reasons.
The game broke the record for the coldest game at Arrowhead Stadium. The Chiefs beat the Broncos 48-17 on December 18, 1993. Footall Reference reports the temperature at the start of the game was 0.5 degrees.
December 10, 1972 Metropolitan Stadium, Minneapolis Green Bay 23, Vikings 7. Temperature at game start 0. Wind Chill -18. Green Bay’s running backs, John Brockington and MacArthur Lane combine for more than 200 yards rushing, 99 by Lane, who had come over from the St. Louis Cardinals that year. Later, Lane was with the Kansas City Chiefs and in his last year in his career, 1978, rushed for 144 yards against the Bills. He was 36 years and 199 days old and remains the oldest player to rush for more than 100 yards in an NFL game.
January 20, 2008 Lambeau Field New York Giants 23 Packers 20 on a 47-yard field goal 12:25 into overtime by Lawrence Tynes. Temperature -4, Wind Chill -24.
December 26, 1993 Lambeau Field Packers vs. the now-LA Raiders. Packers win 28-0. Game time temperature 0, Wind Chill -22.
January 15, 1994 Ralph Wilson Stadium, Buffalo, Coldest game played at Orchard Park in Buffalo. Game start temperature 0, Wind Chill -32. Bills come from behind in the fourth quarter with a fourth quarter touchdown pass from Jim Kelly to Bill Brooks to win 29-23.
December 3, 1972 Metropolitan Stadium, Minneapolis. -2 at the start with a windchilll of -26. Vikings kicker Fred Cox outscores the Bears with three field goals and two PATs in a 23-10 Minnesota victory.
Kansas City’s defense again was dominant, keeping the Dolphins out of the red zone all night long. Miami’s only score was a 53-yard touchdown pass and run to former chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill who otherwise was not a factor in the game. The win against Miami moves the Chiefs into next week’s game against the Buffalo Bills, who beat the Pittsburgh Steelers last night in the game delayed for a day because of a typical Buffalo winter storm that dumped more snow into the stadium than an army of scoopers could remove on Sunday.
(miz)—The Missouri Tigers reached the halfway point of their regular season Saturday, losing their sixth game in their last seven outings and could drop below .500 tonight when they play league-leading Alabama on the Crimson Tide’s court. Alabama is 11-5 overall with a five-game winning streak. Missouri is now 8-8. The Tigers join Arkansas and Vanderbilt in the SEC cellar with 0-3 records.
SB Nation’s Sam Snelling reports the Tigers have not defeated a high major opponent since losing Caleb Grill early in December with an injury to his non-shooting wrist. He had surgery and might be back later this month.
Snelling suggests coach Dennis Gates is giving his veteran players a chance to right the ship, but it’s not working. Five of his guys have played more than 100 games in their college careers with Nick Honor accounting for 139. Noah Carter, John Tonje, Connor Vanover, and Sean East II all have more than 100 games. He wonders when Gates will realize his veterans aren’t getting the job done and when he will start building for tomorrow with his younger guys. (zou)
(BASEBALL)—No big new signings by the Royals and the Cardinals but the Redbirds have made an interesting front office move by hiring Chaim Bloom as an advisor. Bloom was with the Boston Red Sox until he was dumped by Fenway Sports Group despite being credited by some with cutting spending while rebuilding the team’s farm system.
He’ll be an advisor to Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak, who plans to step aside after the 2025 season, prompting questions about whether Mozeliak is grooming his successor. Mozeliak warns against jumping to conclusions. “where it leads to, we’ll see,” he says.
It’s the second major advisory step taken in the off-season by the Cardinals, who signed Yadiar Molina earlier as an advisor, prompting speculation about his role growing from advisor to manager. Molina is managing in the Puerto Rico winer league and wants to manage in the bigs. Present Cardinals manager Oli Marmol is in the last year of his contract. Mozeliak does not expect friction between the M’s. Although he’s a supporter of Marmol, he also recognizes the Cardinals cannot have another year with problems on the field and in the locker room.
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