Causal Essay

 What topic have you chosen for your first major essay, the causal paper?
 What is your research question?
 Why is this topic interesting to you? For example, what does it have in common with your values, interests, hobbies, or career goals?
 What kinds of ideas do you have for this paper so far?



After what seemed to me to be a somewhat great deliberation of which topic I should use in writing my first paper for class, I have finally decided to write about gambling in the state of Texas, and the affects it will have on Texas should the legislature pass the bill in office at the moment to legalize gambling in Texas. My research question for the paper will be something along the lines of, in the legalization of gambling in the state of Texas, the government may be more adequately able to distribute funds throughout the different areas of the Texas government, by securing ample amounts of funds that it is currently losing to other states. Each two years, the Texas legislature meets and decides on a budget for the next 2 years, until they meet again. This meeting may not be able to adequately suffice the state, and in some occurrences it did not suffice, leaving the state of Texas with deficit they had trouble covering. The topic is interesting in two ways to me personally. The first is that I believe it could actually help the state financially whereas now they are losing tons of revenue to other surrounding states, which have casinos and legal-to-gamble laws. The second is become I am an avid Texas Hold’em Poker player. I love the game very much, and to play in some of my poker tournaments, I must travel to other states, driving for hours at a time to play for 1-2 days sometimes. To me, for just a few days of playing, this amount of traveling to and fro is absurd. When I go to these casinos, as I walk to the front entrance, I always look at the license plates on the cars, and I seem to find that at least 80-85% of the cars in the parking lot are from Texas. Some of the ideas I pose in this essay are not only to pass the bill in legislature to legalize gambling, but also to rebuild the recently destroyed Galveston to be a hot spot for gambling. My only concern with this, is that Galveston has been destroyed twice now by hurricanes, and some people might not be willing to take the risk of building there. Even so, rebuilding in Galveston is not a necessity; it is merely an idea to bring revenue not only to Texas, but to Houston and the surrounding area as well. The casinos may be built wherever, the main goal is simply to get them built.