Leadership Quote by Donald L. Carcieri

The line lands like a warning shot dressed up as budget talk: not “gambling is bad,” but “dependency is corrosive.” Carcieri’s phrasing turns revenue into a relationship with a power imbalance. “Already too dependent” implies a quiet threshold has been crossed, that what began as a convenient funding stream has become a structural need. The sentence is less moral scold than fiscal diagnosis: once a government plans around gambling receipts, it starts protecting the machine that produces them.

The kicker is the pronoun drift. “We” suggests the public, the state, the civic commons. “Them” is deliberately vague, a shadowy corporate “industry” rather than a named opponent. That vagueness is strategic: it lets listeners project their own villains (casino operators, lobbyists, out-of-state interests) while keeping the charge broadly applicable. Then comes the rhetorical inversion: instead of the state owning the policy, the policy “owns” the state. It’s a compact way to describe regulatory capture without using the term, and it makes the risk feel existential rather than technical.

Contextually, this kind of language fits the Northeast’s perennial bargain: plug budget gaps with sin taxes and gaming expansion while insisting it’s “just revenue.” Carcieri is trying to reframe the debate away from immediate dollars and toward long-term sovereignty. The subtext is political leverage: once gambling revenue becomes indispensable, the industry’s threats (jobs, investment, “take it to the neighboring state”) start writing your legislature’s calendar.