DN Editorial: Game-ing the system: We wonder, with the new casino license as with fracking: Who profits?

EIGHT YEARS ago, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board awarded two licenses for Philadelphia casinos.

The first, SugarHouse, opened on Delaware Avenue four years later. We all know what happened to the second: Foxwoods was delayed and delayed until it no longer became economically viable, and almost four years to the day of granting Foxwoods a license, the gaming board revoked it. Then began the long, slow process of awarding that second license to someone else.

Yesterday, the board ended the suspense when it announced that the second will go to Live! Hotel and Casino, to a partnership that owns Parx, in Bensalem. The site is on Packer Avenue near the sports stadiums.

It wasn't a gasp-worthy announcement - for one thing, the news that Live! was the likely winner leaked early. But save for those who applied for the license, the suspense wasn't killing anyone. The saturation of the regional market, and the implosion of Atlantic City as a gambling mecca, has taken the shine off casinos as a state-sanctioned salvation.

Back in 2006, casinos were going to bring joy and prosperity to the state, or at least to the locales that hosted them. Unless, of course, you owned a house in the neighborhood, or were a community member who feared parking, traffic, crime and other horrors that casinos would bring.

Besides episodic horror stories, the worst case didn't happen, at least for Philadelphia. But neither has the best case.

According to the gaming board's annual revenue reports, things are going pretty well - as long as you're not one of the gamblers who have so far lost a total of $15 billion since the state's slots parlors opened (table games are measured separately). Slots are highly taxed, at 34 percent, and the state does well by them - the tax take has exceeded $5 billion, or about $800 million a year.

Where has that money gone? Why aren't we better off as a state?

The casinos employ a total of about 17,000 across the state. For the most part, these are not high-wage jobs. So it's not exactly an industry that has transformed our economy - even at the local level. It doesn't help that the governing decisions about casinos are out of local hands; they're forced on us by the state Legislature, which legalized gaming, and their locations decided by a board that doesn't live here.

Someone is thriving because of gaming. We just wish we knew who that was.

In fact, it brings to mind another industry that has increased its presence in the state recently amid big promises of prosperity for all: the fracking industry.

According to a 2013 gas-drilling report by the Multi-State Shale Research Collaborative, that industry has netted about 22,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania. And in all of the counties in which fracking occurs, the jobless rates are not significantly different from the other surrounding counties. Drillers pay fees but no taxes. Impact fees average about $200 million a year. At the same time, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, the market value of natural gas produced in Pennsylvania exceeded $11.8 billion in 2013.

Meanwhile, amid this ocean of money, the state ranks at the bottom of the country for job growth. The state budget has a $2 billion deficit. We are not only not investing in education, but starving the system.

A few are getting rich and the rest suffer. There's something terribly wrong with this picture - and this state.