But it should be. Horse racing shouldn't be subsidized and I love racing. Sink or swim.

I disagree. When the choice is between subsidizing an industry that the State has soaked for over 100 years while being able to raise significant tax revenue or having no casinos and having your residents subsidize the citizens of other states they are forced to go to gamble, the former is an easy choice.

When the gov't institutes competition with any existing business the existing business is almost always compensated in some way. Plus it isn't a subsidy when the existing business (the racetrack) becomes the casino, it is a business deal. If the casino has no relationship with the track whatsoever it would be considered a subsidy.

100 years? So let's make up for lost time....why is the Post Office a failure? And Amtrak? Racing can survive but it will look different.

What NYRA gets is not a subsidy. The land on which Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga sit was given to the state in exchange.

This here is what folks call a false equivalency.

Nick is absolutely right here, I used the wrong term. It is not a subsidy and NYRA in particular paid dearly in this deal with the theft of their land which, let's be honest, the State took for purposes that are not in the best interest of the horse racing industry.

Comparing racing to the Post Office or Amtrak is absolutely ridiculous, in fact, it only highlights what happens when the government gets their hands on an industry and ultimately destroys it. In NY in particular, the State is the single most contributor to the model that has left NY horse racing not profitable.

Going back to the early 1970's and the decline of the model that made NY racing successful, the first big dent was OTB. I know there will be those who will blame NYRA for this since they had the opportunity to run it initially, but it is a choice that NYRA, Roosevelt, Yonkers, etc. should not have had to make. The only reason OTB's were put in place in NY was so the State could get a bigger cut of the money. Then when the State ran the OTB's they did so in a manner which had no interest in the racing industry but only suited the State, bigger cuts for the State and patronage and destroyed the racetracks' ability to remain profitable.

Any business whose model starts getting turned upside down by having more and more taken away from it will ultimately get to a point where there are too many hands in the cookie jar taking too much money from the business that it can no longer sustain a profitable model. It is the same reason that pushing higher and higher taxes on business ultimately becomes counterproductive because you put too many of them into a corner where they can no longer make a profit.

NYRA has been dealt the most ridiculous cards over the last 40 years that remaining profitable is impossible due to State interference. And I don't want to hear the decline in attendance BS.

Randall, your reasoning is not logical. You want to ignore how the government has put the racetracks in position to have an unprofitable model. Instead, you just want to say regardless of how we got here, the racetracks are responsible for getting out of a hole dug for them by someone else by themselves. Or as you say, lets chain a 1,000 pound weight on horse racing's legs and tell the industry sink or swim. :rolleyes:

I can't speak to NYRA's deal, I'm speaking in general on the nature of subsidies of which the NJ model of thoroughbred industry had for a long time and cost the state money in the process....The past is the past. Calzone had it right, you have lots of options with your gambling dollar, if tracks don't find an economy of scale and not assault the bettor with outrageous takes, they will be gone. The Parx and PIDs of the world first, the others to follow.

NJ never lost money on horseracing nor was horseracing there given a subsidy. All the nonsense out of NJ didn't take into consideration that when Gov fatso was saying that horseracing was costing the state money it was because they didn't include the large profit that NJbets (NJ OTB) was making. The horseracing industry in NJ was given money by Atlantic city casinos in order to stop pursuing slots, not as a subsidy. It really wasn't that much different than the deal that the MN Indian casinos cut with Canterbury except in that state the casinos didn't treat the tracks as an enemy.

Racinos
 

Coming from Rhode Island home of first Racino in the US articles like these were used to turn the public against the dog owners who brought the machines into Rhode Island.
It took a few years but they voted to change the terms and paved over the track the next week.
I don't want to tell you how they treated the simulcast fan.