Staggered

This BBC News story has me utterly flabbergasted. How anyone with a functioning brain, let alone university tenure, can suggest with a straight face that there could be "more money generated by the gambling sector than any other" escapes me. It should be immediately and patently obvious to anyone more evolved than a rhesus monkey that gambling can by its very nature never generate money. All any form of gambling can possibly do is redistribute money that is already available, and a sustainable gambling industry can only function by redistributing money from consumers to casinos. Gambling does not produce any form of goods useful to anyone at all, nor does it perform any useful service or even provide something you could define as art or culture. The only situation under which it can possibly perform a useful economic function is in an economy with a culture of savings where it would be in the interest of the overall economy for more money to be spent, but this hardly applies to the U.K., with its gigantic mountain of credit card debts. In a society where people are already spending more than they can afford, all gambling can do in economic terms is redistribute some of that spending away from other areas which do produce some kind of tangible good, service or cultural artifact. It can never provide a benefit to the economy in general or individual consumers on average. I'd love to see how that guy manages to prop up his ridiculous argument.