VICKSBURG - Here's something to ponder: Had bonds been issued to lure the casino industry to Mississippi at the same dollars-per-job rate as the Nissan plant near Canton, taxpayers would have been put $3.6 billion in the hole.
Instead, the opposite is true. Since 1992, the state and casino communities have collected $3.8 billion from direct taxes on wagers - with not a penny needed for incentives.
This doesn't argue against the value of the 4,000 jobs Nissan brought to Mississippi after winning a $363 million bond issue or Toyota and the 2,000 jobs coming to Blue Springs in Union County, for which $294 million in bonds were authorized this year by the Legislature.
Quite the contrary. Both of those hard-won deals and the $400 million PACCAR plant near Columbus are coups well worth celebrating.
It's just that the contrasts between casino developments and other projects are many and irresistible.
A few:
1. While lawmakers always speechify on delivering more jobs for their constituents, those serving in the Legislature 17 years ago had absolutely no idea that the measure they casually passed would bring 40,000 jobs and a $1.5 billion annual payroll. There were no studies, no hearings, no debates on what has been the biggest economic development revolution in state history.
The general belief was that the bill before them in 1990 would allow gambling cruise boats to dock along the Mississippi as the Europa Star, then operating in the Gulf of Mexico, did along the state's coast.
It was three days after the session adjourned before any news stories appeared and details of the legislation, as amended by conferees, began trickling out. Mississippi could have casinos? Dang. Who knew?
2. While the state had then and has now a large economic development apparatus to lure investors, casinos needed no courting. As word spread that Mississippi had sanctioned, subject to local veto, coastal and river casinos, eligible sites were almost immediately flooded with construction workers. Tunica, in 1992, had 16 hotel rooms and was in the top 10 of America's most poverty-ridden counties. Tunica has more than 6,000 hotel rooms today. Six thousand.
3. Even though the state didn't even have creation of a gaming commission as part of its original legislation, communities eligible for development started drafting gaming ordinances - and creating their own local tax levies. Most today add another 3.2 percent tax on wagers on top of the state's 8 percent and the .8 percent the Legislature imposed for host cities and counties. That means every person who walks out of a casino after losing $100 has donated $4 to the local economy and $8 to the state treasury.
Statewide, the tax on wagers alone now generates about one of every 20 dollars the state spends. In some communities, such as Vicksburg, the local share generates seven of every 20 dollars the city spends.
4. While other industries expect to avoid property taxes for at least 10 years on initial construction and expansions, it is expressly illegal for casino developments to get any property tax breaks. The value of their holdings is not insubstantial. The Toyota plant will cost $1.3 billion. The post-Katrina remodeling of the state's most posh casino, the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, cost $500 million. That's more than a third as much as the whole Toyota project.
5. The gee-whiz stuff is not just about taxes and government. From the start, the average casino wage per employee was about $1,000 more than the local prevailing annual wage. In Tunica, specifically, the number of people receiving food stamps dropped in half and the amount being paid in child support doubled. Everybody who wanted work could get it not just in that county, but for miles and miles around.
Even today along the Katrina-ravaged coast, the comeback that has been achieved so far has received a great push from the 10 casinos back in business and the 11th, the Hard Rock, expected to open in July.
Seriously, pause a minute and think what the recovery would be like if casino operators said, "Well, it was good while it lasted," and decided to invest their insurance checks elsewhere.
While the opening or expansion of factories around the state will attract incumbents or candidates to jockey for position in the ribbon-cutting photos, the casino industry draws no such adulation.
Maybe it's because this industry has no tangible product and is centered on using the lights and sounds of slot machines and the allure of chance to separate patrons, some of them pretty liquored-up, from their money.
But even if casinos are "disreputable" and even if they came to Mississippi pretty much by accident, which they did, they're here - and the effect has been profound.
We just don't talk about it.
