Greetings

Just love the snarky condescending tone of the letters. My good-ness the 'holier than thou' just reeks like ummm the horseshit hypocrisy that it is.

Some peole gamble even a lot, some people buy super expensive titanium golf clubs while paying mega for a round of golf and some folks who'll never get it in a milion years, sit on the sidelines and whine.

Me? I'm addicted to sitting in a half circle...

No you wouldn't get it ;)

Enjoy the journey

WarLord

While I don't disagree with your assessment of the condition of housing stock in LV, I don't believe subprime loans in and of themselves are the source of their housing market's problem. LV was becoming massively overbuilt since the mid-90's, and supply exceeded reasonable demand. The subprime catastrophe was the result of builders and sellers devising marketing plans to play to the major emerging supply: subprime. After all, a seller/builder does not have to sell to anybody based on their financing; unacceptable financing is a legal reason to reject an offer. I know that in a regular seller's market (1995-2003 or so) unusual financing with a greater risk of not closing generally gets rejected. But since subprime financing allowed for higher sales prices and higher sales volumes (due to a larger pool of buyers with less money/credit/income), builders/sellers saw it as a way to keep the boom times going.

As a guy on Bloomberg put it today: the two areas most affected by the housing bust are 1) in the Great Lakes due to unemployment; and 2) LV/AZ/FL/SoCal, which were overbuilt. Subprime might have exacerbated the problem, but these areas' problems were caused by greed.

my BF and I flew in and out of Vegas for our southwestern vacation. (We did not do any gambling.) I will never forget driving by countless new home communities. On any given street, there were three kinds of houses: New houses that were empty; houses that were only half finished and had been abandoned; and houses that had someone living in them. The subprime meltdown - and other factors - have devastated the Vegas economy.

If you have not seen the documentary "Maxed Out" I urge you to rent it. A realtor from Vegas was featured in the film. She was going on about buying more house than she needed - all on credit. I wonder what happened to her.

... on when Las Vegas will get the news about global warming. (Or "climate change" or whatever euphemism you want to use; maybe "global climate catastrophe" would work.)

Try to imagine a carbon-neutral Las Vegas "gaming industry." Now try to imagine pigs flying. The second is a lot easier, isn't it?

I think AL's on to something: as gambling has gone more mainstream, it's started to mirror economic trends in the general population. But there's something else, too, as a corollary: Vegas, we all know, over the past two decades has become less focused on gambling and more on becoming Disneyland-in-the-Desert. The focus on attracting Ma and Pa Kettle from Ohio, while providing things for Jimmy, Johnny and Sue to do, has made Vegas reliant on people like that; so when Pa Kettle has to take that salary cut or Ma sees $4 gas, they change their vacation plans and the big Vegas operators suffer accordingly.

Time was when Vegas catered to and depended on superwhales like Johnny Chang or professional greaseballs to keep the cash rolling in. No longer. Live by the demographic, die by the demographic, I say.

Some people save to go on a vacation... it just so happens I save to go to Vegas once a year for the NCAA tournament instead of taking a cruise, etc.

Could I take all that money and go somewhere else? Sure I could, but I'd rather get a group of friends together and get a little crazy for 3 nights of fun.

I've lost more than I've won, but my losses have been less than half of what I've taken for 9 years now. There's not many vacations where you have the opportunity to actually leave with more money than you've taken.

So maybe I can do math. Maybe I am sane, logical, and realize what I can spend on a vacation and choose to do so in Vegas with friends.

If people really are cutting back on gambling then most people who gamble aren't the addicts I see on public service commercials from the state lottery commission. But I wounder if that article included lottery, scratch-it and restaurant/bar video poker sales in addition to track and casino gambling. It may be that, as a couple of people have pointed out, the cost of traveling to casinos and race tracks has made them less attractive. Maybe people are just gambling closer to home.

Personally I've always regarded all of these forms of "entertainmant" as a tax on those who can't do math.

Las Vegas is a service economy within a service economy. How is it that mortgage lenders haven't shut down the gaming business, don't they realize that the players are putting the rent money on the line, their rent money? Could it be that the chain reaction might cause more harm to the overall economy, and that overweighs the benefits of advocating personal fiscal responsiblity?

Listen to our President, who extols consumers to spend money, at a time when that advice may be the worst possible. Can such a man be trusted to run the country? Does it reflect a new economic reality, in which gambling is the pinnacle of Social Darwinism. (What happened to Jeffersons natural aristocracy?). It makes you wonder if Bush believes he got where he is by hard work, intelligence, and fair play, or he won the (birth) lottery. Hahaha, I almost had myself convinced for a moment.

I have to agree with TimbukTom about the fat, smoking strangers who occupy space at gambling dens. I travel to Shreveport, Louisiana, regularly on business and am often taken to one of their "riverboat" casinos by my hosts for a show by some long-ago faded star, the most "memorable" of which was singer B. J. Thomas ("Hooked on a Feeling"), who took the last half of a VERY long show to preach about finding Jesus. I mean, he went on and ON! The audience, who had come to gamble away their mortgage payments and social security checks and listen to a human jukebox, nearly stampeded out of the place, however "politely."

But I never once ran into anybody I know, either from Shreveport/Bossier City or from Dallas, a city that sends bus-loads of especially elderly "gamers" east to Shreveport every day. So again, as TimbukTom asked, "Who are these people?!"

One thing I do know, it's not me. Gambling isn't a sport, it's a disease that I wish to avoid like the plague it is. And I also am not fat and I don't smoke tobacco, so I don't fit in very well...