Never let it be said that casino owners are dumb. Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to them and they played it perfectly. I mused here that I wondered how long it would take after the hurricane for the casinos to line up for tax breaks. The answer: 22 days. Well, sort of, they didn't even have to ask.
So, lets break down exactly how this con game played out. Mississippi is getting ready to change the law to allow casinos to be built on land in effort to build some sort of Hillbilly Riviera on the Gulf Coast. Along comes Katrina. The floating casinos have a choice, barge them away from the storm to safety, or let them get destroyed.
The casinos chose to allow themselves to be destroyed knowing that shortly thereafter they would be obsolete once the new land based ones were built. Hell, they stayed open until Sunday night before the storm hit. They got exactly what they hoped for.
Now, they turn the total loss over to their insurance companies who will in turn fork out a large portion of the construction costs for the new land based casinos they were going to build anyway. Bush and Barbour throw in tax incentives for icing on the cake. By the way, the casinos have always been excluded from tax incentives in Mississippi.
I have a feeling the insurance companies know they got played, but casinos pay a lot of insurance money and they will try to recover their losses in the future. Probably off of you and me.
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