Is the Smoking Ban Hurting Charities?
Interesting discussion on the St. Paul Issues List at E-Democracy regarding the smoking ban and its effect on pull tab sales:
The smoking ban has improved the health of those who patronize and work in bars but I still hear a terrible gasping coming from these establishments.
It’s the sound of charitable gambling organizations on life support. The city has offered to help bars add patios to offset the smoking ban; what are they offering nonprofits that rent space in these bars?
To me, this raises the larger question: Should charities be pull-tab dependent?
Assuming the smoking ban IS the cause of the drop off in pull-tab sales, shouldn’t charities simply find a different way to seek out the un-spent money? Perhaps something that would put a larger percentage of the pull-tab expenditures to work for charitable causes?
January 6th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
What? You mean these people would move their charitable giving elsewhere merely because they couldn’t smoke for an hour? Inconceivable. These true patrons of charity would never do this, it must be a smoke-screen from businesses angling for government support.
The good Lord giveth and taketh away. These ‘losses’ were ill-gotten gains anyway, so where do the gambling dollars go instead of to pulltabs…probably to the Indian casinos, and what could be more fitting, eh? That as sad americans piss away their money, it ends up back with the Indians who a few generations earlier had their land and resources stolen by these gamblers forefathers.
God loves irony…let the pulltab people exploit other weak people, maybe put them into schools as fundraisers instead of selling frozen pizzas and books…or maybe government supports for the pulltab industries are in order.