re: #110 lostlakehiker

What huge profits? Here’s a site with a graph of casino stocks vs. the overall market. Note that casino stocks are, well, a gamble. Right now, they’re tanking relative to the market as a whole. volatile stocks

Trump Entertainment Resorts went bankrupt. broke

This same site has a table over on the upper right, giving Friday’s (August 5, 2011) stock results. On a day when the DJIA went up, almost all the stocks are down. One is down 27%.

Property values have collapsed in Las Vegas. Cities with burgeoning business don’t rank number 1 in the category of worst drop in housing prices.

Today’s economy is not producing happy, flush, confident bettors who imagine that their luck in the real world will translate to luck at games they can’t possibly beat for long.

Such confidence is always misplaced, but right now, it’s just about nonexistent.

Neither is there much of a supply of people who just want a lark and don’t much care if they lose. People with money they might have had to burn have already lost gut churning sums of home equity and 401K value.

Las Vegas is getting poor because willing, gaily indifferent losers are what fueled the growth of Las Vegas, and they’re just not around in the numbers they used to be.

My point, “Lostlakehiker” wasn’t about the current state of the economy in Las Vegas. The casinos are posting lower profits simply because it is a reflection of the overall state of the economy. People are traveling less and gambling less. My point is that over the years, Las Vegas, like the majority of cities in this country has failed to invest in it infrastructure. This for a city known for generating wealth numbering in the billions since it’s founding in the 50s.

It is clear that many people amassed large sums of riches through their capitalist venture in Vegas. This includes Donald Trump who you mentioned regardless of the failure of Trump casinos. He literally walked away with the bank through his bankruptcy. He is not the sole person involved in making riches through the predatory casino industry. Tax shelters, tax exemptions and write offs have contributed to the decline of the American landscape of which Vegas is one. They made billions and did not invest in the city which now literally looks like the old cities back east in places.

So after all of these years of being in black what does Vegas have to show for itself besides dirty streets, dangerous neighborhoods, crime, rampant alcoholism, and so on. Where was the investment made for the working people and their children in education beyond the high school level and the attainment of a college education which has become a for-profit industry in this country. While those that create this wealth, that upper 2 percent live like kings, and the poor and middle class struggle and face low pay even within the casinos. There is not future for a country that continues to operate in this fashion where the oligarchs, the rich, literally hoard their wealth not only to the detriment of their local environment but to the nation as a whole.

And this is just Vegas that I am speaking of. It is happening in every city and every town in this country. We are sacrificing the needs of society at large, including its infrastructure, for the parasitic and selfish needs of the rich. You don’t have to look very far either. We’ve seen it take place in the halls of congress last week.