Down the drain: One of Andrew Yang’s first big ideas is a dangerous dud

The two dozen or so candidates vying to be mayor of New York need to focus less on swearing fealty to progressive dogma and more on generating big, smart, actionable ideas to help bring back an economy knocked to its knees by COVID — creating quality jobs and closing budget gaps that, if left to fester, could become city-swallowing sinkholes.

Good for Andrew Yang, we guess, for putting a pile of chips on the table. Too bad his first big idea, after repackaging a watered-down version of the universal basic income proposal that powered his run for president, is a total dud.

Put a casino on Governors Island, said Yang: It “would generate so much money it would be bananas,” and “that would be one of the engines of recovery.”

Oh? Casinos are proven failures in reviving cities, especially with increasingly pervasive online and mobile gambling, which is already over the river in New Jersey and likely soon to be authorized in New York State this year. The city’s only other casino, a gambling magnet at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens that took more than $1 billion to build, is flagging, its revenues cannibalized by an oversaturated market.

Plus, luring gamblers to lose billions — maybe plunking down their Yang-delivered universal basic income? — on the 172-acre island, a former Coast Guard and Army base, is at odds with its brilliant reinvention as a public park, climate solution center and more. A 2003 deed restriction with the federal government officially bans casinos.

When Yang’s spitballing was confronted with reality, a campaign adviser said, “this idea, like many others, would not advance unless stakeholders believed in the process, which is far from even beginning.” Far from even beginning is not a descriptor for Yang’s campaign. It’s well underway. Act like it.