The Casino Economy

I grew up in and around Lake Tahoe. Everybody works in some way or another for the casinos there. My mother was an accountant for the Visitor's Authority, the people who come up with those shiny "Come to Lake Tahoe" ads.

She had some close friends, Uncle Bruce and Aunt Deb. Bruce was a bartender at one of the swankiest casino bars, Deb was an office manager for a vacation property business. Bruce was also a gambling addict, and while he was doing well their marriage was fine. He won the money for a down payment on a house. Then for a swimming pool. Then an Audi and a big new truck. New living room furniture. Then a boob job for Aunt Deb.

Then he started losing. Deb had an affair with her boss, then with one of my boyfriends. Then some crazy spiritual guru type. Turns out the boob job was because Bruce had been drinking so much he couldn't get it up, but blamed his lack virility on Deb's flat chest. Deb went a bit crazy with humiliating Bruce in every possible way after that. She could ignore the consequences of Bruce's gambling and alcohol problems as long as he was bringing in big wins.

Seeing close up what gambling does to people, I've never been a gambler. I will spend exactly one dollar on the lottery when the prize climbs over 100 million, and I once gambled $4 on the ponies.

Our entire economy is like Bruce and Deb's marriage, built on winning streaks and crashing on losing ones. It is not an economy based on the real things, like productivity and output. I remember during the heady Clinton economy, when I made a middle wage income, paid taxes, had a little house that the rent was always paid on time, and a car that I paid the loan off early. Back in those days, the stock market used to DROP when the new unemployment numbers came out, because the unemployment number was low. Too low to drive down wages. To low to cut benefits.

And economic system that celebrates high unemployment and mourns low unemployment is broken.

And now we have this huge financial crisis not based on anything real. We have a game of financial chicken where banksters are saying give us money or we will crash the whole system. It's like Bruce and Deb. "gimme more money or we will crash and burn this marriage".

The thing is, Bruce and Deb got divorced. Bruce got help. Stopped drinking and gambling. Deb moved away and stopped sleeping with boys her daughter's age. They were better apart than they were together.

It is time for a divorce from the casino economy. It is time to go back to valuing companies for what they produce over what their latest stock price is. It is time to value homes as a place where people live and can pass onto their children instead of as a commodity to be sliced and diced and repackaged so that every last drop of profit can be squeezed out of it by people who not only don't live in it, but don't even know the address.