Ridiculous Washington at it Again
The State of Washington is making headlines again this week with the announcement that Margarita Prentice, a state senator, has found a way to further expand land gambling in the state. Gambling legislation in Washington is really keen on the double standards – specifically standards that heavily ban the online casinos and internet gambling industry in every way while supporting land gambling and boosting revenue that directly funnels into the state budget. Washington has the harshest penalties against online casino gambling out of all of the US states; it’s a felony offense in the state to participate in any forms of internet gambling from poker to the chance gambling sites.
This legislation was instituted to protect land gambling interests that bring in a lot of money to the state budget in the form of tax revenue. Prentice instituted the harsh online casino gambling penalties back in 2006 and has now announced that new legislation is attempting to legalize keno in the state. The new keno legislation that is making its way through the state would generate an additional $30 million annually for the state budget – that’s no small figure. The state has a budget gap next year, and keno is the supposed solution to that gap. The online casinos and internet gambling companies feel that policy could be a little hypocritical though, for a state that is so against the expansion of internet gambling interests, it seems counterintuitive to then push for a much larger land gambling industry too.
But that’s just the crux of the issue; the state of Washington is not against the online casino gambling industry on principle, but rather for money. The strong penalties for internet gambling are merely the key way that the state has managed to protect it’s budgetary interests that are funded by land gambling.