Published: April 09, 2008 08:40 am      

Gambling: Just another addiction

Readers Views

Dear Editor:

I have listened to the political discussions in amazement the last few months and I need some answers.

We are living in very difficult times and I know the answers are difficult and will probably hurt but I just don’t get what politicians are thinking.

When gas is so expensive, the average family is having to cut back just to get to work (if they still have jobs) and to get to the grocery store (where everything is going up weekly because of transportation costs).

Then medical costs and insurance costs take another large cut. People in Kentucky are dying daily simply because they have no insurance.

Then there is the housing debacle. People are losing their homes because they can’t pay their mortgage and mortgage companies all about to go under because they’ve lent to bad risks and encouraged people to go in debt beyond what they could pay.

What I don’t understand is the politicians’ solutions – gambling, taxing already struggling small businesses and then setting aside money to help gambling addicts.

What messages are we giving our children when we finance their education with gambling money, when we make deep cuts in our educational system and increase the money to keep our citizens in our jails? It sounds like a big gamble to me.

It seems to me improving our economy would come by improving our education so that companies will have a good selection of well-trained workers to staff their well-paying jobs in a state that makes a healthy environment for business and families to grow.

We already have major problems in our state with drug and alcohol addiction. It is responsible for many of our arrests and our crowded jails. It’s responsible for broken families and broken children. We have so many families dependent on the state for their living. There was a time we were promised they would be trained and returned to the work force. This hasn’t happened because so many are addicted to drugs of one kind or another and we aren’t addressing the problems.

There comes a time when we all need to be responsible for ourselves, to teach our children responsibility for their choices but we need to start by holding parents responsible for themselves. Then we need to hold our politicians responsible for making decisions (no matter how hard) that are right and based on sound principles.

We need to learn to live on what we have and learn to save. We need to learn the privilege of hard work and frugal living. We need to get our priorities right. We also need term limits so we can get fresh ideas and not career politicians who do and say what we want to hear in order to keep their jobs. We take good care of our politicians. Maybe that would be a good place to start cutting back.

The gambling issue scares me most because of the addictive nature of gambling and the other problems that go with gambling.

First, with gas prices so high, are people going to be able to go to casinos without taking money from the family’s budget?

Then who will be going to the casinos? Will it be the people who have worked hard to build wealth and provide for their futures or will it be the desperate person, about to lose his home that takes what he has and gambles it away, making his situation much worse? The ones who win at casinos are the ones who own them.

Why do we want to bring something into our state that will add one more addiction.

When will we wake up and return to some moral absolutes that say hard work is rewarded by fair wages, frugal living is rewarded with what you need and compassion means we protect and help people who need it with a hand up so they too can become independent and self-sufficient.



Madeline Duncan

Eubank, Ky.