Back in the early 80’s Iowa Governor Terry Branstad signed Iowa’s first form of gambling into law the Iowa Lottery. Soon after he signed perhaps the funniest. Iowa puritans being what they were wanted more revenue from gambling, but not the guilt that would come with it. So they threw a little glitter on it and called it “Riverboat Gambling”. See if you had to be on a boat on water, it wasn’t a vice. Don’t ask questions. In their mind, throwing your money away under the guise of ‘tourism’ made it pure as the wind driven snow.

Before long we had greyhound tracks, and horse tracks and bunny tracks (no wait that’s ice cream). Then they did away with the water requirement for casinos – kind of. Prairie Meadows was landlocked, but Lakeside down in Osceola had a pond and a boat, at least to start with. It gets all rather messy. Just never get between a State Legislator and a new revenue source. So now nearly 40 years later we have the most forms of gambling this side of Vegas! Oh and I almost forgot! The most recent new form of vice is online sports betting! Does it get any better than that??

What is interesting about it, and is a testament to the stupidity of Iowa voters, is their taxes never even went down! In the days pre-1970 or so Nebraska financed most of their State Government off the income from their horse track Ak-Sar-Ben. Did Iowa? Heck no! Our property taxes stayed in the stratosphere, our income taxes were still sky high, we still had local option sales taxes. Nothing went down! We had all these personal bankruptcies and families destroyed as addicts gave their life savings to the State in all the various forms of gambling, and we still paid out the ying yang in taxes!

So enter the March Reader’s Digest: The Case of the Broken Lottery Machine. In 2015 one Pauline McKee was playing the slots at the Isle Casino Hotel in Waterloo (water, see) when she came up a big winner! $41,797,550.16 was what the machine said she had just won! But what’s strange, the casino didn’t wheel out the pallets of cash. Not at all. Their buddies at the Iowa Supreme Court never even let the case get to court. They just dismissed it out of hand! They just said the machine had malfunctioned and that the casino didn’t have to pay. Well isn’t that convenient? Not $41 million, not $4 million, not $400 thousand, not $40 thousand, not $4 thousand, nothing! Your government at work.

[P.S. – notice the picture above? Everyone is under 40 and stylishly dressed? The sophisticates  out ‘gaming’. Go through Prairie Meadows slots area sometime. Its 73 year old housewives from Altoona in sweat pants and curlers plugging the one-armed bandits. Glamour is the last thing it is.]