The casino gambling industry in the U.S. generates nearly $329 billion a year in economic activity, according to a new study by the industry’s national trade association.
The American Gaming Association released a study Monday showing the industry’s economic impact in 2022 was up 26% from 2017, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Commercial and tribal casinos support 1.8 million jobs, including 700,000 jobs at casinos themselves or related businesses, about the same as in 2017. Those jobs generated $104 billion in wages across the country, up 40% from 2017, according to the study.
I find this so mind bogglingly frustrating.
Journalists and reporters seem to have no fucking clue what ‘the economy’ is even supposed to represent or what ‘growing’ it means.
Stuff like entertainment, social media, or tourism being listed in the economic sense, are you kidding? Stuff like tourism never ever grows “the economy” in the overall human sense of the global economy. It may grow an individual’s or a country’s economy, but that’s at the expense of another individual or country that is losing money.
Inventing a new thing or process though? That legitimately might grow the economy if it’s more efficient or better than the old process in some way. Since it stands to increase the overall amount of free available resources for use…
But casinos and gambling though? That is at best just tourism, but in reality is likely a massive drain on the overall economy since encouraging gambling addictions just increases the number of people ruining their lives instead of actually inventing / doing something new, or even just contributing an average amount to sustain the economy.
Even general entertainment and tourism are better. There is a certain unquantifiable quality to the societal value of human services of that kind. The thing is that gambling expenses are so far removed from the cost of providing them as to be absolutely absurd.