Gambling In The United States
Gambling is legally restricted in the United States, but its availability and participation is increasing. In 2007, gambling activities generated gross revenues (the difference between the total amounts wagered minus the funds or "winnings" returned to the players) of $92.27 billion in the United States. Commercial casinos provided 354,000 jobs, and state and local tax revenues of $5.2 billion as of 2006. Critics of gambling claim it leads to increased political corruption, compulsive gambling and higher crime rates. Others claim that gambling is a type of regressive tax on the individuals in local economies where gambling venues are located.
Read more about Gambling In The United States: Gambling Revenues, History, Authorized Types, Legal Issues, Commercial Casinos, American Indian Gaming, Lotteries, Recriminalization
Famous quotes containing the words united states, gambling, united and/or states:
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)