{"id":120,"date":"2009-04-10T17:52:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blogs\/dmckee\/index.cfm\/2009\/4\/10\/Texas-afterthoughts"},"modified":"2009-04-10T17:52:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T21:52:00","slug":"texas-afterthoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/texas-afterthoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas afterthoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

My apologies for leaving regular readers high and dry on Thursday. I was KO'd by a viral infection of some sort. Between that and a couple of doses of Zicam, I spent most of the day drifting in and out of sleep. Amazingly, I managed to stay awake through the early part of a Dodgers\/Padres<\/strong> game in which neither starting pitcher could find the strike zone with two hands and a flashlight (the first two innings took an hour to play), only to doze off as things became — moderately — interesting and each team overcame its aversion to scoring runs.<\/p>\n

Wednesday's report on Sheldon Adelson<\/strong>'s surprise appearance in Austin, prompted this reader reaction, posted here because it was devoured by LVA<\/em>'s Comment-Eating Server: Regarding Texas and Casino Gaming: IMO the reason North Texas and Oklahoma are so closely linked is because Texas  has strong beer and strong porn, and Oklahoma has Casino Gaming, and both sides are more OK with it than they want to admit<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Having taken note of Adelson's Texas<\/strong> peregrination, the Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/em> said to Las Vegas Sands, in effect, "Show me the money<\/a>!" (Adelson is promising to spend $2 billion-plus on a Dallas-area casino.) The company's response was that its current troubles "wouldn't impair its ability to invest in Texas, in large part because even if gambling is legalized there licenses wouldn't be up for grabs until at least March 2011<\/em>.<\/span>"<\/p>\n

So is Sands promising to have its financial house in order 23 months from now? We'll take that as a "Yes." (Don't forget that Adelson is also courting Massachusetts<\/strong> legislators in hopes of landing a casino deal in his native state.)<\/p>\n

The Dallas Morning News<\/em>, to its credit, did a little number crunching and — at the end of its story — poked a big hole<\/a> in the revenue projections being made by Texas casino proponents. In essence, they're promising 3X-4.5X the amount of casino-tax lucre that Nevada<\/strong> pulls in, with only double the tax rate and a tiny fraction as many casinos. Uh-huh.<\/p>\n

Then again, the poster boy for a Lone Star casino industry is the man who once crowed<\/a>, "We could build 10 Las Vegas Strips over here [in Asia], there’s so much demand!" How's that working out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My apologies for leaving regular readers high and dry on Thursday. I was KO'd by a viral infection of some sort. Between that and a couple of doses of Zicam, I spent most of the day drifting in and out … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[113,112,12,31,114],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}