“A self-licking ice-cream cone”: NY’s billions in horse racing subsidies

Horse racing kills horses, exploits workers, creates generations of addicts, draws few spectators, provides no return to the state – so why do we continue to subsidize the industry? As Noah Schactman tells it in the New York Times, it’s basically because a bunch of good old boys and wealthy lobbyists want to keep their favorite pastime alive.

There’s no shortage of great quotes in Schactman’s article, which examines the industry’s manifold toxic effects. Some of our favorites are below. 

On animal abuse

The race New York Thunder was running had a $500,000 purse. As the financial rewards of racing get bigger, so do the incentives to keep running the animals. But breeding practices that favor speed over durability have caused successive generations to grow genetically homogeneous and vulnerable to injury. These days, multiple veterinarians tell me, nearly every thoroughbred is running wounded.

On worker exploitation:

One worker has been in a walking boot since last summer, she told me, when a horse pinned her to the side of the barn. “Every stable has a phone number where if I hit my horse, they can report me,” she told me in Spanish. “But if a horse hits me, my boss doesn’t call an ambulance to take me to the hospital.” When she got herself to the hospital and explained her injury, she said, she was fired.

On poor attendance:

Back in the day, when horse racing was the only legal form of gambling in New York State, 20,000 or more people would jam the stands at Yonkers Raceway, cheering wildly as the standardbreds ran their mile-long harness race. But on this day, despite the beautiful July weather, just a few dozen spectators hang around, slumped into faded orange seats along a chain-link fence. Even with online betting, the racetrack takes in less than one-fortieth of what it would have at the sport’s peak. So the horses take their two laps, head back down the runway and exit the track to something near silence.

On the return on investment (or lack thereof):

Few things are more inspiring than seeing a horse run, and the feelings that these animals evoke in humans can border on the mystic. But that’s neither an economic nor a policy rationale for spending billions on an unpopular sport. So why do it? Why keep propping up a pastime that, despite many attempted overhauls, can’t keep its fans and takes such a heavy toll on its athletes and workers? Our state and local governments struggle to pay teachers what they’re worth, to build affordable housing, to put enough firefighters on a rig.

Three years ago in the Times Union, Emilie Munson examined New York’s $2.9 billion in handouts to the horse racing industry since 2008. It’s long past time for the state to pass bills like S157 (Salazar) / A3063 (Rosenthal) and start ending giveaways to this corrosive industry.

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Other NY corporate giveaway news you may have missed:

• The Buffalo Bills reminds Buffalo that they are the sole deciders of who receives $3 million in community benefit spending as part of their $1.1 billion subsidy deal (Buffalo News).
• The Investigative Post recaps the Empire Center’s new report on the Micron deal.
• An official in Trump’s DOJ criticized the Southern District prosecutors still going after Cuomo acolytes from the Buffalo Billion scandal (Times Union).

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