I'll leave it to others to criticize John David Dyche's evisceration of Governor Ernie Fletcher in today's Courier-Journal. His point that Steve Pence supports casino gambling "for the sake of the horse industry and state coffers" got my attention.
After falling for the lottery sales pitch in Kentucky, are we really going to tie our hopes to casinos? Dyche's suggestion that "social conservatives" are Pence's only stumbling block to making gambling his cause celebre ignores the facts. Casinos cause drastically higher government spending to attempt repair of the social damages caused by those same casinos. There are lots of ways to go to hell in Kentucky already, so social conservatives have their hands full; the real resistance to casinos should come from fiscal conservatives who aren't interested in inviting even greater need for entitlement spending into the state.
