Maverick Financial Planning

Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr. take a long and in-depth look at John McCain, McCain’s passion for gambling, and McCain’s personal and political ties to the gambling industry. There’s a lot of material there, and much of it has no really clear political upshot and just illustrates some elements of his biography. But there are, I think, five key takeaway points from this.

One is that I think reasonable people can disagree about the best possible regulatory regime for casino gambling. I don’t, however, think that reasonable people can take the view that casino gambling is such a socially valuable enterprise that it merits special tax subsidies. And yet, McCain “voted twice in the last decade to give casinos tax breaks estimated to cost the government more than $326 million over a dozen years.” That’s not, in truth, a very large amount of money relative to the federal government. But ranting and raving against minor instances of government waste is McCain’s signature political issue, and tax expenditures to encourage casino gambling are a lot less justifiable on the merits than are expenditures to study bear DNA.

Second is that we see here that McCain’s “maverick” personality does seem to run pretty deep. McCain gets involved in stuff like this:

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

And good for them. But of course a typical marathon session of tossing $100 chips around on the craps table ends in thousands of dollars in losses. This, it seems, is John McCain’s personality. He enjoys the act of making high-stakes wagers so much that he happily does it in circumstances where he well knows that the odds are bad.

Third, you see that John McCain, like other legislators, has a close relationship with lobbyists for interest groups whose interests are positively impacted by his policy agenda. Also like other legislators, McCain tends to take policy positions that have a positive impact on the interests represented by lobbyists that he’s close to. This is a totally unremarkable situation, but McCain’s public image rests to a large degree on the idea that these general principles somehow don’t apply to him when, of course, they do.

Fourth, as he’s said before, John McCain is “divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have”:

Few people can afford a McCain-scale gambling habit, and even fewer can maintain to keep it up for decades without being driven into penury. But then again, few people are married to wealthy heiresses.

Last, casinos are, as everyone knows, in the habit of handing out various special favors, “comps,” and so forth to the high rollers who frequent them. When the high roller in question is also personal friends with casino owners, also a major recipient of casino industry campaign contributions, and also the single most influential congressional regulator of the casino industry the situation is an enormous conflict of interest. How much free stuff does McCain and his entourage normally get when he hits the VIP room at his favorite casino? My understanding is that the whole point of such rooms is to shower the “whales” with freebies to encourage them to stay.