newjerseynewsroom.com

Legalizing gambling has turned out to be a slippery slope. A state might be the first in its region with a new form of gambling. But its financial success only attracted copycat legalizations in neighboring states. Soon, profit margins decline and states are off on another hunt for a way to attract more of the citizens' money to gambling...

Now with the nation increasingly saturated with gambling opportunities, the push is on to expand gambling to the Internet. Its spread there in the United States was long inhabited by federal prohibitions. But on September 20, 2011 the justice department reversed its long-standing opposition and opened the door to state regulated online gambling.

So far Nevada and California are leading what is sure to be a rush to online poker—the initial game of choice

Apparently all the previous arguments against online gambling no longer have force. The modest sums expected from the games, concerns about minors masquerading as adults, about hackers getting credit card information, and about the addictive aspects of betting from your own home have fallen by the wayside. All that matters is getting more revenue from something that is not labeled a tax.

In New Jersey, for example, where governor Christy previously vetoed an online gambling bill, he has now "got religion" and vows to make his state the “epicenter’ of Internet gambling.

As to current promises to limit the online games to poker, well, you’d have to be pretty naive not to recognize that those pledges will go by the board when poker fails to produce enough to bridge state budget gaps.

For good or ill, the country is off on a new explosion of gambling. You don’t have to go to Las Vegas to gamble; you don’t even have to go to the corner convenience store; you don’t have to go anywhere –except to the bank to explain why you are overdrawn. And you only have look in the mirror to see who the losers are as we become a nation of gamblers.

Richard C. Leone is senior fellow and former president of The Century Foundation, a public policy research foundation in New York and Washington. He served as Chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and as State Treasurer of New Jersey. Mr. Leone also was a member of the National Gambling Impact Commission established by Congress in 1998, President of the New York Mercantile Exchange, and a Managing Director at Dillon Read & Co., Inc., an investment banking firm.