I'll take your word for it on your love of racing. I guess I'm coming from the viewpoint that NY, through its high parimutuel taxes and parisitic OTBs, is doing its best to try to prevent racing (forget about NYRA) from competing on a level playing field with other gambling enterprises (compare horse racing's takeout to the house's advantage at a casino), so I'm tired of the "we poor taxpayers are constantly bailing NYRA out" routine recently advanced by members of the NYS Senate.
Let's put it this way. Up here in Malta, the state has pledged over $1 billion dollars to build a plant that may - and I emphasize MAY - allow a Texas company to employ a couple of hundred workers. Meanwhile, the politicians seem hell-bent on playing games with a horse racing industry that employs over 40,000 New Yorkers. Even assuming that we don't fix the broken model (which everyone at the earliest stages of the franchise process agreed was broken), and the track operator needs a $20 million per year subsidy to ensure that those persons dependent on the industry remain in their jobs, that's far less than the state already takes out of the game, so I fail to see how the taxpayers are harmed in all this. And let's keep in mind that the numbers were talking about do not account at all for the income taxes that those working in the horse industry pay into the state coffers.
|