A long-term gamble

By Yvonne Abraham, BOSTON GLOBE STAFF

Here’s the takeaway from Speaker Robert DeLeo’s Thursday morning gambling-legislation-rollout spectacular: If you oppose his proposal for two resort casinos and 3,000 slot machines at racetracks, then you’re basically a rotten person.

As he and an army of supporters put it, if you’re not smitten by his vision, then you’re against jobs, local aid, community colleges, and families all over the Commonwealth.

“What this bill is aimed at is the social cost of joblessness, [which] weakens our society and imperils our families,’’ DeLeo said.

The recession has handed gambling proponents a perfect moment. Sitting by the Grand Staircase at the State House, facing a sea of despondent, unemployed union workers, it was hard to marshal an argument against this thing without feeling like a heel.

The people on those stairs, and thousands like them, need work. And building casinos would provide plenty — maybe as many as 8,000 well-paid construction jobs, according to the House estimate, plus another 8,000 less well-paid service jobs once the casinos open.

As a short-term salve for the state’s awful and urgent financial situation, this plan works.

It’s the long term that worries me.

Once the casinos and tracks are open, people will spend as much as $1.9 billion at them every year, according to the most optimistic House projections. Of that, $600 million will come back to the state in taxes, flowing to cities and towns, community colleges, and the state’s rainy day fund.

Super, but where will that $1.9 billion come from?

Rhode Island and Connecticut, DeLeo says, where Massachusetts residents currently spend $1.1 billion at casinos and tracks. Though it’s hard to imagine the folks in Ledyard standing for this, the Legislature’s economic development cochairman, Representative Brian Dempsey, reckons we can get back up to $825 million of the money going to Foxwoods and the others.

But even if that out-there prediction proves right, the rest of the casino boodle — a billion dollars or so — will be coming out of our threadbare pockets.

How will that be possible? Well, some of us will spend money we don’t have. And a lot of us are going to take money we’d be spending somewhere else — in restaurants or clothing stores, for example — and put it on six.

In other words, a giant chunk of the revenue these casinos anticipate is already in the Massachusetts economy. We’ll just be moving it around. C’mon, six!

The people who run some of the state’s theaters understand this. Take the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts, for example. The Thomas Lamb-designed gem, reopened in 2008, has been a huge success, hosting Aretha Franklin, and a bunch of Broadway shows, breathing life into Worcester’s downtown.

But a casino with a large auditorium would clean the Hanover’s clock: It could afford to offer artists bigger fees, and sell tickets at lower prices, because its theater will be subsidized by gambling revenue to get people in the door. It can also prevent artists from performing anywhere nearby for months.

There’s nothing wrong with competition, but who could compete with that?

“We wouldn’t be able to survive that,’’ says executive director Troy Siebels. And if the Hanover dies, the part of downtown it helped revitalize dies, too. And that enormous loss won’t show up in any of the speaker’s projections.

It doesn’t make you a rotten person to recognize that none of the benefits of expanded gambling in this state come without very big costs. And make no mistake about who pays them — from the coins sliding into the slots to the extra patrols on deserted Main streets.

We do.