Two weeks ago I had the chance to realize a dream. I ate at Gordon Ramsey Steak in Baltimore, MD. As a long-time fan of Gordon Ramsey it has been a dream of mine to eat at one of his restaurants and taste his Beef Wellington. Having watched Chef Ramsey make Beef Wellington many times I can say that it was worth the wait.

My experience was one I won’t soon forget. From the first step inside the restaurant to the minute I left it was different than any place I’ve been. That’s true not just because every detail screamed of excellence as if Chef Ramsey was standing right there. It was an altogether different experience because of the backdrop of this fine-dining experience.

Gordon Ramsey Steak is inside the Maryland Horseshoe Casino.

Several weeks ago I wrote about the link between the lottery and poverty. If you missed it, you can read that article here. The relevant facts are that the lottery is most popular in areas with concentrations of low income and minority people. In other words, the lottery is a “tax” on poor people that hope to get rich by playing impossible odds. Oh, and the lottery is most popular and most played in liberal, democratically controlled states.

Speaking of odds, the inside of a casino is a depressing place for a financial professional to observe. My immediate observation was that on a Wednesday night the casino was filled with elderly people that were either retired or near retirement. The reality that many people were hoping to “win big” using money that should be contributed towards retirement, or, using actual retirement income, is perplexing.

Presently, 45 states in the U.S. have at least one casino, according to one website. Only Alaska, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia currently do not have at least one casino. The same website also reports:

“There are more than 1,000 active casinos in the United States of America. These gambling establishments generate high revenue, with an estimated 71.1 billion USD in 2015, and a reported annual growth of 3.1 percent. According to the American Gaming Association, casinos employ more than 500,000 people directly and have a total job impact of 1.7 million inhabitants.”

A more recent report says the estimated revenue generated by casino gambling is now up to $73 billion per year. To put that in perspective, that is enough to hand every man, woman, and child in America a check for $221 dollars, all 330 million people.

The typical arguments in favor of opening a casino range from improving state sponsored services like schools and hospitals to increasing funding for education. On the surface these sound like honorable goals for bringing a casino to a community that may otherwise be struggling. But, as the gambling watchdog group Stop Predatory Gambling makes clear, these goals are rarely realized:

“According to the Rockefeller Institute of Government at State University of New York-Albany, the organization doing the best independent research on public revenues from gambling: ‘In the long-run, the growth in state revenues from gambling activities slows or even reverses and declines. That’s because income from government-sanctioned gambling does not grow over time like general tax revenue. In addition, expenditures on education and other programs will grow more rapidly than gambling revenue. Thus, new gambling operations that are intended to pay for normal increases in state spending add to, rather than ease, long-term budget imbalances.”

The predatory nature of casinos can be seen in the odds of winning. Take, for example, slot machines. This casino favorite enjoys broad patronage and “favorite” status among the average casino gambler. And yet, a simple internet search reveals the odds of winning are 1 in 1000. Now, that’s certainly better than the odds of winning the Powerball or Mega millions lottery (1 in 300 million), but the odds still favor the house.

Consider this, suppose I put 1000 plastic cups in the middle of a football field. And I said, for every dollar you give me, I will give you one marble to throw and, if it lands in a plastic cup, I will give you $.94 cents in return. You would likely look at me like I was crazy and politely decline my offer.

But this is the odds and payout rate of the average slot machine. Knowing this, why do so many people continue to waste their hard-earned money on something that will ruin them financially?

The answer to this is psychological. If you’ve never heard of BF Skinner’s rat reward experiment, click here to learn more about how gambling creates addicts. This is the predatory nature of gambling. The fact that state and federal governments are sponsoring casinos with tax breaks make those governments complicit in preying on people and creating addicts. The fact that governments prop failing casinos up with tax dollars means every citizen, even non-gamblers, are directly affected.

I enjoyed my dinner at Gordon Ramsey Steak. The Beef Wellington was better than I imagined it would be. But I can’t help feeling as if I have contributed to the problem by spending money at a place inside the casino. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.