Lots of people saying things along the lines of "this is bad for society, therefore it should be banned," and kind of making the implicit assumption that the counterargument against "sports gambling is bad" is "sports gambling is good."
I don't think that's it at all - the counterargument to "sports gambling is bad" is "we live in a society that places an incredibly high value on personal freedom, so we should err on the side of allowing people to do what they want, even if it results in some amount of harm, because the inherent value of allowing freedom of choice is high."
That's not to say we can't ever ban things - obviously there is a degree of harm that is high enough that we should sacrifice particular freedoms (e.g. you can't have a nuke). And FWIW I think this one certainly sits close to the line of being worth banning, but the point is that it's not a clear case just because the direct benefits to society of people gambling (which are minimal) outweigh the harms (which are substantial).
I think the most helpful way to consider the tradeoff is by using examples of what we allow in society now. Alcohol's a good one - without question a hugely harmful substance overall, but we allow it. Is gambling more or less harmful than alcohol?
Aside from the "ban/don't ban" dichotomy, I think the other option is to basically add some legal friction to doing something to the point where those who really want to partake still can, but its difficult to the point where a lot of people who might otherwise participate don't bother. I take this as the main point of the article, its not that sport betting was impossible previously, but you used to have to travel to a casino or sign up for sketchy, illegal web sites.
Now there's almost no friction. You can place bets just by clicking on your phone, and not only that, there's now a ton of ads and other media reminding you that you can do so. Its pretty clear that this change has caused a huge increase in the harm done by gambling, so even if we don't want to straight up ban it, it seems worthwile to impliment at least some of the limitations that article suggests
Fwiw, for reasons I don’t question, I’m up about 7800% with online sports betting. I regularly cash out, and claiming the winnings on taxes is painful. It wipes out whatever tax write offs you thought you had.
I doubt that OP is talking about taxing player winnings. He's probably referring to taxing the betting companies. Anyway, I'm sorry you had to pay income tax on the income you made. Truly painful.
It's basically a case of heads you win 60%, tails you lose 100%. In almost all cases the taxes that you're required to pay on winnings is much more than the writeoff that you can get from losing, e.g. https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/jobs-and-career/can-you...
I cannot imagine how it would benefit society to provide full deduction of gambling losses, and can conceive of avenues for corruption to expand if it were offered.
That's true but the complaint that gamblers have (at least those who pay taxes in the US), if you win a big jackpot in January, say $10,000, and over the course of the year you lose all $10,000 so that you're even, you still have to pay tax on the jackpot (as normal income) but can't reduce the amount by the subsequent losses. Yes there is some ability to deduct some losses as expenses but it's not an even trade. It's hard to win at gambling, much harder the way the US tax code is structured. Keep in mind that many countries don't tax gambling winnings at all, so many people feel the US rules are unfair from the start.
Too late to edit my own comment but technically it is incorrect. If you keep meticulous records of the offsetting losses, the IRS may allow you to claim zero gambling income in that fiscal year and relieve you of having to pay tax on income.
What I stated above is true across fiscal years. If you win a $10,000 jackpot on December 31, and lose all $10,000 on January 1 (or at any point over the next 12 months), the above comment is true. You don't get to reduce your income in the next year by the $10,000 of losses, or edit the previous year's return, or offset the earlier win in any way.
I could shorten that to “why is paying income tax painful” but if you don’t understand taxes, it’s like a micro version of winning the lottery, you don’t get all of it.
Sorry, I just meant the original comment sounded like there was something especially onerous about income taxes on gambling winnings compared to tax on other types of income.
I dunno, it’s hard to describe. Imagine $10,000 on $47 and realizing that half that money never existed. I don’t mind paying the taxes on it, but claiming gambling winnings basically defeats any sensible financial tax strategy.
I think I’m the only person I know who claims them. I’m about to give it up because I never needed the money, it’s just fun to beat the house. The taxes really do suck.
As a US taxpayer, if you win $10,000 on one day and then lose $10,000 the next day gambling, then you have to report $10,000 net gambling income for the year and pay taxes on that - even though you actually made zero.
> Alcohol's a good one - without question a hugely harmful substance overall, but we allow it. Is gambling more or less harmful than alcohol?
an exceedingly lazy skim of the literature has alcohol with all cause mortality at about an odds ratio of 1.27 [0], gambling disorder about 1.8 OR for all cause mortality w/ 15 OR for suicide [1]. So gambling is comparable to substantially worse than alcohol.
Perhaps the better rephrasing of your counterargument is "we live in a society that places an incredibly low value on public health." Gambling is an emerging public health crisis and allowing i-gaming is most certainly the wrong choice. Which probably means we'll allow its expansion at great cost to society. At least the gambling companies will get some cashflow though :3
The argument "is it worse than X which is already allowed" is a nice legal argument, but it is completely unmoored from the reality that now you have twice the actual damage to society.
If I invent a new addictive substance that has the same risk profile than alcohol but doesn't displace it, alll ivve managed to do is create another new problem of the same magnitude. Rinse and repeat until your "standard" wrecks society.
There is a very actual example with COVID: "it's just the flu". Well, even if it were true (it isn't, BTW), we now have two "flus" knocking off our workers, fragile citizens and healthcare...
Most gambling (and alcohol) addictions are the result of mental disorders, not freely chosen.
Not aving things in society which actively prey on people with atypical dopamine response patterns to the point of them committing suicide, harming others, and going into deep financial and physical ruin is ... an easy "tradeoff."
Most alcohol addictions are the result of mental disorders, not freely chosen. We know how that ended in the US.
I can count the number of times I consumed alcohol on one hand (I.e. I would not care at all if he hit Prohibition 2). But I'm not society. So where do we draw the line between "healthy" consumption of a nigh objectively bad thing and "this is a genuine danger, ban it"?
Just my two cents, but I think the appropriate compromise with highly addictive activities that we know can be harmful is to pass regulation surrounding advertisement/marketing. Particularly on advertisement/marketing to children. That way we allow freedom of choice while also assisting those who are more vulnerable to addiction.
I do not think it's appropriate to be constantly bombarded with ads for gambling when attempting to participate in sports culture. As of right now, it is unavoidable, whether watching on TV, going to the stadium, at the stadium, listening to sports commentary, or in the wider fan ecosystem (podcasts, YouTube, etc).
I think society needs to draw the line when the bad thing harms innocent people. Addictions always impact the entire families, not just the person with the addiction.
The problem with banning alcohol is the enforceability is impossible. Enough people wont agree with the ban and we can't just throw everyone in jail. Similar cases include gun control or tobacco.
As the article discusses you don't need to ban alcohol you can just make it more awkward:
- tax it
- restrict the sales by age, location and time(see Nordic countries for a really strict version of this)
- minimum unit pricing
- warning labels
Etc.
You can argue if this is the right thing to do or not but it is enforceable and there's good evidence that these measures reduce consumption and harms.
Not sure if a serious question, but, yes, it is a lot, a lot more harmful than alcohol. I'm close to mid-40s and by this point in life I got to know both alcoholics (the dreadful '90s here in Eastern-Europe was full of them), a group which would include member of my family, and gambler addicts, which would include very close friends, and the latter are by far the most wretched human beings, it's not even a contest.
I've been in GA since 1998. How they differ is fundamentally this: you can't drink your entire week's wages worth of alcohol in a week. You can gamble your entire week's wages in a few minutes. An alcoholic or drug addict cannot indefinitely hide their habit due to the physiological effects that eventually become apparent. Compulsive gamblers can keep gambling for years, appearing to all like a functioning member of society, gambling way beyond their means before they get caught. Gambling addicts that turn to crime typically commit the biggest/longest running thefts/fraud. Gambling addiction has the highest suicide rate by far.
I’m all for people having the freedom to throw rocks. Can you try not to hit me in the face with rocks, though? It’s annoying.
Similarly, if you want to place a wager, that’s great. If you want protection under the bankruptcy code because your executive function is poor, please try to avoid sticking me with the bill. It’s annoying.
Part of the issue is how "the thing" (in this case, gambling) mutates post-legalization (and also via technology). Sports betting was a minor pastime that a small percentage of the public engaged in, mostly just occasionally and usually for minor stakes. Part of that was the inherent friction - you needed to either be in Las Vegas or have an illegal or offshore bookie. And still, you needed to place bets in person or on the telephone. Today it's in your pocket 24x7, every sport available including international, and instead of betting on a game, you can bet every quarter, every player, every play. The degree to which sports gambling has penetrator society has multiplied probably 100x over what existed prior to legalization.
Oh, and sports is just a doorway to full mobile casino gambling (slots, blackjack, video poker, etc), already legal in a few states, growing quickly, which will ultimately be a much larger gambling market.
The problem here is the argument in favor of extreme freedom of choice is "I do what I want" is not a mature or rational ideology. Other than circular rhetoric around the idea of "freedom" no attempt is even made to justify the public or societal harms that this ideology opens the doors to. Why a simple cost benefit analysis isn't sufficient to plonk a ban in place is something of a mystery if you remove catering to petulant individuals as an objective.
Edit: If you think there's something incorrect with dismissing individuals ability to externalize harms to other blameless individuals I've got a 50 gallon drum of spent motor oil I'd like to externalize on your lawn. Explain why that's problematic.
I would be all for making sports gambling legal and unrestrained if society wasn't expected to pick up the mess if something goes wrong. The same argument with drug legalization: if we are morally on the hook for millions of dollars in rehab costs, then no, you shouldn't be allowed to do hard drugs. Alcohol and tobacco use are similar vices where I'm not ok with unrestrained access if society is expected to provide the resources to pick up pieces of bad results. Freedom with responsibility for your own actions is fine, freedom without responsibility is not ok, it simply isn't a feasible option.
I fail to see though how we can do this correctly either way though.
Option 1: full ban on alcohol and hard drugs because we have safety nets in place - basically similar to hard drugs today, but the bans are impossible to enforce and society is still constantly getting f*ked (take a walk anywhere in SF).
Option 2: libertarian style, no bans on any vice but personal responsibility is in full force, no bailouts for those who get in trouble. Problem is the addicts will still make a huge mess of things for the rest of us and they won’t clean up those “messes” themselves so we either put up with massive crime and addicts everywhere… or grudgingly pay for them anyway.
I’m not saying any of this to rebut and say you’re wrong, rather, I agree with you that those would be the ideal combos but I don’t know how we could make them a reality.
But then we are just stuck between option 1 and 2 as we are right now. My point is option 3: libertarian no-ban but full social safety net is the opposite of ideal, while options 1 and 2 are ideal but not achievable.
So here we are with some rules and some safety net, because its the only workable option?
What about the negative externalities? Sports betting has led to more mental illness, bankruptcy, and people who resort to government benefits and crime. The libertarian philosophy is generally live and let live as long as it doesn't harm others.
This site is puritanical, although I have noticed this a lot with the left wing. In addition to speech policing the nags are going hard after gambling and alcohol. I’m very surprised they haven’t tried to outlaw porn to Save the Women
In the US 'the left' (and it's various offshoots) is pretty much a straight-line descendent of Puritanism, albeit stripped of it's direct religious motivation. So while the right may ban porn because 'evil woman parts leading us astray', the left will ban it because 'exploitative patriarchal degradation of women'. In reality they've just found a different rationalization for a cultural choice that was made when the Mayflower first dropped anchor.
> So while the right may ban porn because 'evil woman parts leading us astray', the left will ban it because 'exploitative patriarchal degradation of women'
Your whole comment is pretty silly considering only one of these things is actually happening.
I don't think that's it at all - the counterargument to "sports gambling is bad" is "we live in a society that places an incredibly high value on personal freedom, so we should err on the side of allowing people to do what they want, even if it results in some amount of harm, because the inherent value of allowing freedom of choice is high."
That's not to say we can't ever ban things - obviously there is a degree of harm that is high enough that we should sacrifice particular freedoms (e.g. you can't have a nuke). And FWIW I think this one certainly sits close to the line of being worth banning, but the point is that it's not a clear case just because the direct benefits to society of people gambling (which are minimal) outweigh the harms (which are substantial).
I think the most helpful way to consider the tradeoff is by using examples of what we allow in society now. Alcohol's a good one - without question a hugely harmful substance overall, but we allow it. Is gambling more or less harmful than alcohol?