New Jersey Casinos Close

For the first time in 28 years, casinos in Atlantic City, the second largest casino city in the world (second of course to Las Vegas), have shut down. The reason for the shutdown stems from a New Jersey state budget showdown. The budget showdown has forced the state to effectively shutdown until a budget is passed. Under New Jersey law, casinos must be monitored by official state auditors. Since the auditors are emplyed by the state, and since the state is shutting down, there is no one to audit the casinos. So, Atlantic City casinos have to shut down…until a budget is passed.

Now does that make sense;-)

Really, it doesn’t make sense. The state makes millions in taxes from the casinos each day, yet they pay only thousands per day for state auditors. The purpose of shutting down the state was to not spend money the state hadn’t yet passed in a budget. But, any third-grader could tell you that it would have been easy for the state to temporarily alot some of the casino taxes towards continued auditing, saving themselves millions per day.

This issue is bound to get bigger and bigger with each passing day. We are bound to start hearing analyses of the legitimacy of gambling, the effects of casinos on local and state governments, the moral concerns about gambling.

But you know what? More than anything, we’ll hear the words “Atlantic City” and “casinos” over and over throughout the national and foreign press. Despite what they’re saying in public, this publicity is good news for Atlantic City as the second biggest casino town in America. Whereas it usually gets severely overshadowed by Las Vegas, at least for a couple days it’s finally getting a bit of the limelight. In fact, I’m willing to bet that the very existence of Atlantic City will be news to some people, and a fraction of those people will make their first trip to AC just because they found out about it from this story.