Byron Dorgan: “I have said previously on this floor in discussing some other items that one of the growth industries in America…”

“I have said previously on this floor in discussing some other items that one of the growth industries in America, regrettably now, is gambling. There is more spent, at least for the more recent year I have seen, there is more spent for gambling in America than is spent on America's national defense. In a recent year, it was $400 billion-plus just on legal gambling. We spend less than $300 billion on America's defense. I think all of the questions that relate to this issue of gambling need to be asked and need to be studied. It was interesting to me one evening when I had the television set on, though I was not really watching it much--and on one of the local stations in the Washington, DC, area they were doing their live drawing for their lottery. They do that live with these little ping-pong balls with numbers on them. It was on the screen. I never participated in those things. This was on the screen, and then across the bottom of the screen scrolled an urgent news bulletin. It was not so urgent that they would take the lottery selection off, because they were doing that live, they did not want to interrupt that. So they kept on picking the lottery balls out and announcing the numbers. The news scrolled across the bottom of the television screen that Gorbachev had just resigned in the Soviet Union. I was thinking to myself, this is incredibly bizarre.”