As gambling companies further intensify their ongoing barrage of sports gambling ads targeted at the American people, we recently hosted a national panel on what you need to know about the massive wave of sports gambling advertising and promotions spreading across the U.S.
Mark and Harry powerfully revealed the truth about what is really happening in our communities and across our country. After you watch it, we strongly urge you to share the video on your email list and and your social media networks, inviting people to learn for themselves how serious the problem of predatory gambling has become.
We also strongly encourage you to share the video with every local, state, and federal official in your region, along with members of the local and state media.
Mark A. Gottlieb is the executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University School of Law, where he is also a lecturer and clinical instructor. Mark has focused his research and advocacy on tobacco litigation as a public health strategy for most of his career. His article, “Casinos: An Addiction Industry in the Mold of Tobacco and Opioid Drugs” (co-authored with Daynard and Friedman) was recently published in the University of Illinois Law Review. You can read his article here.
Harry Levant is the Director of Education for Stop Predatory Gambling and a public health advocate from Philadelphia. A gambling addict in recovery who made his last bet on April 27, 2014, Levant is dedicating his professional work to helping people and families to overcome struggles with gambling addiction and other substance disorders. In his role as an advocate, Levant will graduate from La Salle University with a Masters in Professional Counseling in May 2022. He is a member of numerous professional organizations including Chi Sigma Iota National Honor Society for Counselors, the American Counseling Association, the Pennsylvania Counseling Association, and Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers of Pennsylvania. He also earned a law degree from Temple University Law School.
Moderator:Les Bernal is National Director for Stop Predatory Gambling. Stop Predatory Gambling believes people are worth more than money. A 501c3 non-profit based in Washington, DC, its members work to reveal the truth behind commercialized gambling operators to prevent more victims.
It is only because of the selfless financial generosity of our members that we are able to fund important events like this national webinar. If you support our mission to reveal the truth behind commercialized gambling operators to prevent more victims, please become a member of our national network by making a gift of any size you can afford today.
Thank you.
Les BernalWATCH: What You Need to Know About America’s New Wave of Gambling Ads
“A Conflict Between Love and Greed” – Learn about the crisis of state-sanctioned gambling. Stop Predatory Gambling’s Les Bernal was invited to speak on the crisis of state-sanctioned casinos before an audience in Amherst County in Lynchburg, VA at Temple Baptist Church on Sept. 30, 2021. The region faced a massive lobbying push by out-of-state gambling interests attempting to force a slot machine casino into the heart of their community.
Stop Predatory Gambling believes people are worth more than money. Our members work to reveal the truth behind commercialized gambling operators to prevent more victims. Get started at https://www.stoppredatorygambling.org…
Les BernalWATCH the Truth About Casinos: “A Conflict Between Love and Greed”
(Note: The image above is the $100 lottery scratch ticket the Texas Lottery is selling in low-income communities across the state where citizens earn $7.25 an hour. The MLK image on the left is AN ACTUAL AD that the District of Columbia Lottery used to market lottery tickets.)
In the euphoria of winning the first major legislative action against slavery in modern history by abolishing the British slave trade in 1807, the English abolitionist Henry Thornton was asked what issue should be the nation’s next important fight. His answer: “The Lottery, I think.”
Ridiculous, you say. Why would one of history’s foremost campaigners for the abolition of the slave trade rank lotteries among society’s biggest injustices? Because of the life-changing financial losses that citizens suffer as a result of state lotteries. Here in the U.S., more than $500 billion of personal wealth will be lost by citizens to lotteries over the next eight years, much of it taken from African-American families.
State attorneys general have sued opioid makers, tobacco companies, polluters, and many other businesses for the damage their predatory, deceptive, and destructive practices inflicted upon the public. Yet not a single state attorney general has ever sued a lottery for the financial and social damage they have caused millions of American families.
Why? Because many public officials now consider lotteries an essential source of government revenue. So essential in fact that while public schools and other core state government functions were shut down because of COVID-19, every state lottery was still selling tickets. Several lotteries broke sales records for scratch tickets soon after economic stimulus checks and extra $600 weekly unemployment benefits began arriving to citizens.
Where does the hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth lost to lotteries go? Several states claim lottery revenues “fund public schools.” In California, the lottery contributes just 1% of the total K-12 education budget. In New York, it’s under 5%. In states like Georgia and South Carolina, lottery revenues are used to fund college scholarships, many of which go to students from middle-class to upper-middle class families. And in some states, like Colorado and Oregon, lottery profits are used to fund parks and other environmental protection projects because to be green, you need “the green.” Where the money comes from appears to be a secondary matter.
Like six-story high Robert E. Lee statues, we have been told state lotteries are part of “our heritage.” Yet the willfully-neglected truth is state lotteries are a contributor to the massive wealth disparity between whites and blacks. Nationwide, African Americans spend five times more on lottery tickets than white people.
The path to wealth is not just about how much you make, which is the side of the ledger almost always attracting public attention. It’s also about how much you keep. While differences in income are a major contributing factor, the disparity between whites and blacks in the accumulation of wealth-building assets is staggering. According to the Federal Reserve, 60% of whites have a retirement fund while only 34% of blacks; 73% of whites own a primary residence but only 45% of blacks; and 61% of whites own publicly-traded stocks compared to just 31% of blacks.
Building assets and the accumulating and investing of savings are the keys to financial peace. Owning a home, a college fund, retirement accounts, and a stock portfolio are the hallmarks of middle and upper class America, and these assets are all the result of savings. With fewer African-Americans and people of color holding these essential assets, they miss out on higher average returns than low-risk assets, as well as the power of compound interest.
Creating wealth by the accumulation of assets and the investment of savings is the direct opposite of what state lotteries represent and encourage. “The Fastest Way to a Million Dollars,” “Road to Riches,” “$200,000 a Year for Life,” “$10,000,000 Bankroll,” and “$7,000,000 Supercash” are just a sampling of the hundreds of different lottery scratch tickets that state governments across the United States are marketing at this very moment during a time when more than 20 million citizens are unemployed, of which a disproportionate amount are African-American.
But no one is forcing people to gamble away their future financial security on state lottery games, you say. While true, it is more like luring people into a life-changing financial trap difficult to escape. State governments deliberately concentrate lottery outlets in economically-distressed regions to entice more low-income citizens, often clustering outlets in neighborhoods with large numbers of minorities. Lotteries also aggressively target these communities with marketing campaigns exempted from truth-in-advertising laws under the Federal Trade Commission.
The types of gambling that used to occur in African-American neighborhoods before states imposed lotteries were local and private, and the money exchanged stayed in the community. Today, much of the tens of billions of dollars that lotteries extract from low-income and minority communities is redistributed to benefit residents of middle-class and upper-class communities. In one example representative of many others, a 2018 investigation by The State newspaper in South Carolina found Orangeburg County in the state had the 11th highest poverty rate and had spent $1,274 per person on the lottery since 2008 — more than any other county. But for every dollar Orangeburg County residents had spent on the lottery, they have received just 41 cents in scholarships, K-12 funding and other lottery funds. In contrast, Pickens County, which has the 15th lowest poverty rate, had spent $141 per person on the lottery since 2008, the least of any county. But for every dollar Pickens County residents spent, they received $3.26 in scholarships, K-12 funding and other lottery funds.
While the wealth lost to gambling now goes elsewhere, state lotteries leave another brand on black lives, especially black women: a severe gambling addiction problem. Results of a large nationally-representative study that investigated ethnicity and rates of problem gambling found that African-Americans had twice the rate of gambling addiction compared to whites and they were also more likely to be women in the lowest income brackets.
To keep the money pouring in, states labor to entice citizens to gamble with an ever-growing amount of new games and new forms of gambling, at higher price points, played at faster speeds, with more frequency, at more locations.
Lotteries are now lobbying hard to massively expand their gambling operation onto the internet, allowing them to open a virtual lottery outlet on every smart phone, tablet, and computer in a state. The future of lotteries depends on their ability to lure a whole new generation of young people to develop a gambling habit.
We don’t ban alcohol and tobacco sales in African-American neighborhoods to prevent people from developing a drinking or smoking habit, so why shut state lottery outlets? What separates commercialized gambling like lotteries from every other business, including vices like alcohol and tobacco, is it’s a big con game based on deceit and exploitation. Lottery games are a form of consumer financial fraud, similar to price-gouging and false advertising. Citizens are conned into thinking they can win money on games that are designed to get them fleeced in the end. If you pay for a pizza, a ticket to a sporting event, or a glass of wine, that’s what you receive in return. With state lotteries, what you receive is a financial exchange offering the lure that you might win money. But this financial exchange is mathematically rigged against you so inevitably you lose your money in the end, especially if you keep gambling. Any success only comes at someone else’s expense. All of this explains why lotteries are illegal unless you run the gambling scheme in partnership with state government.
How do you start to address the problem of state lotteries in America? The first step is to eliminate lottery advertising, marketing promotions, and sponsorships. What leads people to lottery games is the marketing.
A second step is to end the sale of high dollar gambling games, especially in financially-disadvantaged communities. Some states sell scratch tickets as high as $50 in neighborhoods where many residents make a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
A third step is for state legislatures to begin building a Lottery Replacement Fund which would act like a rainy day fund dedicated to helping wean the state from lottery revenues over a period of years.
As almost every facet of American life is rightly being scrutinized for its impact on black lives, state lotteries deserve to be included on center stage. It has been a long time coming.
– Authored by Les Bernal of Stop Predatory Gambling
Annotation:
1) Rev. Martin Luther King’s likeness and message was perverted by the District of Columbia Lottery to market lottery tickets to citizens in a community with a large population of African-Americans. https://www.stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/DC-Lottery-ad-MLK-Martin-Luther-King-e1594605846737.jpg
2) Thornton quote on lotteries: “Bury the Chains,” Adam Hochschild, Pg. 308
3) “$500 billion of personal wealth will be lost by citizens to lotteries over the next eight years…” H2 Gambling Capital https://h2gc.com/ tracks gambling loss figures. The Economist has published these numbers. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/02/09/the-worlds-biggest-gamblers US losses to lotteries are at least $70 billion a year and over an eight year period total losses will exceed $560 billion.
4) “lotteries are considered ‘essential’ during COVID pandemic” and “lotteries broke sales records” during COVID shutdown:
“Coronavirus Crisis Prompts Call to Suspend Lottery Gambling; Antilottery group asks states to suspend lotteries until 30 days after stimulus payments,” The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-crisis-prompts-call-to-suspend-lottery-gambling-11587376800?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1#comments_sector
“Chasing Sales During Coronavirus Pandemic, States Declare Lotteries ‘Essential'” The Intercept https://theintercept.com/2020/04/16/coronavirus-state-lotteries-gambling-essential/
5) “In California, the lottery contributes just 1% of the total K-12 education budget…” https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lo/ceflottery.asp
6) “In New York, it’s under 5%.” https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/education/how-much-lottery-money-really-goes-to-education/71-607297164
7) “In states like Georgia and South Carolina…” low income and minority citizens are funding college scholarships for middle and upper middle class kids: Atlanta Journal Constitution https://www.ajc.com/news/state–regional-govt–politics/now-what-has-hope-accomplished/7tvZcMVQGSKQ19VDOgOc3M/ and The State Newspaper, South Carolina: https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/2018/10/12/south-carolinas-poor-play-lottery-but-wealthier-win-scholarships/1614069002/
8) Environmental protection groups in CO and OR receive money lost by low income citizens buying lottery tickets: Colorado https://www.coloradolottery.com/giving-back/funding/ and Oregon https://www.oregonlottery.org/oregon-wins/
9) “Nationwide, African Americans spend five times more on lottery tickets than white people.” Source: “State Lotteries at the Turn of the Century: Report to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission,” Charles Clotfelter, Philip J. Cook, Julie A. Edell and Marian Moore, all of Duke University http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ngisc/reports/lotfinal.pdf
10) Statistics on the massive asset gap between whites and blacks came from US Federal Reserve Board Survey on Consumer Finances, 2016 and graphed by https://www.visualcapitalist.com/racial-wealth-gap/
11) Samples of lottery tickets:
“The Fastest Way to a Million Dollars,” GA Lottery https://www.galottery.com/en-us/games/scratchers/active-games.html
“Road to Riches,” WI Lottery https://wilottery.com/games/instant-games/road-riches-2139
“$200,000 a Year for Life,” MA Lottery https://www.masslottery.com/games/200k_year_for_life_2017
“$10,000,000 bankroll,” MA Lottery https://www.masslottery.com/games/10m_bankroll_2019
“$7,000,000 Supercash” NY Lottery https://nylottery.ny.gov/scratch-off/ten-and-up/7000000-supercash
12) “State governments deliberately concentrate lottery outlets in economically-distressed regions to entice more low-income citizens, often clustering outlets in neighborhoods with large numbers of minorities.”
Source: “A geospatial statistical analysis of the density of lottery outlets within ethnically concentrated neighborhoods,” Journal of Community Psychology, April 2010 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcop.20376
13) “Lotteries also aggressively target these communities with marketing campaigns exempted from truth-in-advertising laws under the Federal Trade Commission.” “The Predatory Nature of State Lotteries,” Loyola Consumer Law Review, Andrew Clott, 2015 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi48dWzysjqAhVVlnIEHcDdCaAQFjALegQIBBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Flawecommons.luc.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1964%26context%3Dlclr&usg=AOvVaw3iQ5Co3C6j7Dd2lOiWADRO
14) “Much of the tens of billions of dollars extracted from these low-income and minority communities by state lotteries every year is redistributed to benefit residents of middle-class and upper-class communities. For example, a 2018 investigation by The State newspaper in South Carolina….” Source: The State Newspaper, October 12, 2018 https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/2018/10/12/south-carolinas-poor-play-lottery-but-wealthier-win-scholarships/1614069002/
15) “The types of gambling that used to occur in African-American neighborhoods before states imposed lotteries were local and private, and the money exchanged stayed in the community. “ Source: “Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling,” Matthew Vaz, 2020 https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo49299126.html
16) “Results of a large nationally-representative study that investigated ethnicity and rates of problem gambling found that African-Americans had twice the rate of gambling addiction compared to whites and they were also more likely to be women in the lowest income brackets.” Source: “Disordered gambling among racial and ethnic groups in the US: results from the national epidemiologic survey on alcohol and related conditions,” Alegria AA, Petry NM, Hasin DS, Liu SM, Grant BF, Blanco C CNS Spectr. 2009 Mar; 14(3):132-42. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19407710/
17) “Some states sell scratch tickets as high as $50 in neighborhoods where many residents make a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.” Texas Lottery $50 scratch tickets: https://www.txlottery.org/export/sites/lottery/Games/Scratch_Offs/index.html_635453064.html
Texas minimum wage is $7.25 an hour: https://squareup.com/us/en/townsquare/your-guide-to-texas-minimum-wage
Les BernalTaking Down This Monument to Injustice Will Help Millions
The members of Stop Predatory Gambling sent the letter below to leaders in all states with lotteries calling on them to shut down all lottery gambling games for 30 days as hundreds of billions of dollars in direct federal financial relief is delivered to American families across the nation. Luring citizens to lose their money on lottery gambling games during this time defeats the intended purpose of the stimulus. You can download a PDF of the letter here. –—
April 20, 2020
Dear Governor,
We are writing to call on you to immediately shut down the marketing and selling of all state lottery gambling games until the financial turmoil caused by the coronavirus has passed. It is essential that these games be shut down between now and at least 30 days after federal stimulus payments are received by American families.
The reason is simple. Federal tax dollars are being sent to American families in order to put food on the table, make rent or mortgage payments, or provide for other daily necessities – not to subsidize state lotteries.
There is a mountain of facts showing many citizens gamble on the lottery to change their financial condition, and even more so when they are feeling a sense of desperation.[1] Yet state government is continuing to market its lottery gambling games at the very same moment that citizens are receiving their economic relief checks from the U.S. Treasury.
Luring citizens to lose their money on lottery gambling games during this time defeats the intended purpose of the stimulus. Government sending stimulus and unemployment checks to families in need while states continue to operate lotteries will result in greater financial loss for our citizens, rather than fulfilling the intent of providing for essential needs and encouraging consumer spending to benefit the economy and create jobs.
State lotteries are one of the root causes why more than 60%of Americans had less than $1000 in savingsbefore the financial distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic.[2]State governments have turned a nation of small earners, who could be small savers, into a nation of habitual gamblers on course to lose more than $1 trillion of wealth to government-sanctioned gambling over the next eight years.[3] At least half of this wealth – $500 billion – will be lost to state lotteries. It’s America’s most-neglected problem today.
Building assets and the accumulating and investing of savings, are the keys to financial peace. A home, a college fund, retirement accounts, a stock portfolio—these assets are the hallmarks of middle and upper class America, and they are all the result of savings. Creating wealth by the accumulation and investment of savings is the direct opposite of what state lotteries represent and encourage.
We strongly urge you to act now, before the assistance that American families will be receiving ends up being taken by state lottery tickets, rather than invested in immediate needs and churned through our economy for the benefit of everyone.
If you need any additional information about the urgency of shutting down state lottery gambling games, please contact us.
Thank you for your attention to this serious problem.
Sincerely,
Les Bernal
National Director
Stop Predatory Gambling
[1] “Living in Truth: Lotteries Worsen Opportunity, Reduce Mobility Out of Poverty and Deepen Budget Problems,”
A Briefing on State Lotteries by Stop Predatory Gambling, April 20, 2020 https://www.stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2020-Brief-on-State-Lotteries.pdf
The 2020 WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission Report includes a section about commercialized gambling and its impact on kids. It is a major achievement to have gambling in this type of report appearing alongside other unhealthy commodity industries.
Below is the testimony of Les Bernal, National Director of Stop Predatory Gambling, before a Georgia Legislature study committee on gambling in October 2019. As part of his presentation, Bernal explains why commercialized gambling is different than any other business. A copy of Bernal’s slides can be found here.
Les BernalWhy Commercialized Gambling is Different Than Any Other Business
Below is the brief video testimony of Les Bernal, National Director of Stop Predatory Gambling, before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism’s hearing “Post-PASPA: An Examination of Sports Betting in America” on September 27, 2018. Bernal’s written testimony can be found below the video.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on the topic of sports betting in America.
My name is Les Bernal and I am the National Director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a national government reform network of individuals and organizations from across the United States. I’m also a parent and a former high school and college men’s basketball coach.
Stop Predatory Gambling believes in improving the lives of the American people with compassion and fairness.
We believe everyone should have a fair opportunity to get ahead.
We believe every person’s life has worth and no one is expendable.
We believe state government should not depend on commercialized gambling to fund its activities.
Because of what we stand for, we are one of the most politically diverse organizations in the United States, one in which conservatives and progressives work side-by-side to improve the common good. This reality was evidenced by the amicus brief that Stop Predatory Gambling filed in the Murphy case, co-signed by more than thirty different organizations, including some of the most influential liberal and conservative groups in America.[i]
An Urgent National Problem that Only Federal Action Will Address
Leaders of all political stripes agree that improving opportunity and mobility out of poverty is one of the defining challenges of our time. Around 50 percent of the US population has zero or negative net wealth, meaning their debts equal or exceed their assets.[ii] Yet one major contributing factor to this serious situation has been ignored for too long: Americans are expected to lose $118 billion of their personal wealth to government-sanctioned gambling in 2018.[iii]Many of these citizens suffered life-changing financial losses.
If Congress doesn’t take action to address this problem, then the American people are going to lose more than $1 trillion of wealth to government-sanctioned gambling over the next eight years. Sports betting will make these financial losses even worse.
The reason? The almost sole focus of state-sanctioned gambling has been to maximize government revenues, not to promote and protect the public interest.And nothing suggests sports betting will be any different unless there is strong federal action.
Why Gambling is Different Than Every Other Business or Commodity
There is a faulty assumption surrounding commercialized gambling and it has led to very bad outcomes for the American people. It’s the false perception that gambling is just like any other business. What separates commercialized gambling from every other business, including those involving vices like alcohol and tobacco, is gambling is a big con game. Citizens are conned into thinking they can win money on games that are designed, in the end, to get them fleeced. If you pay for a hamburger, a book, or a glass of wine, that’s what you receive in return. In commercialized gambling, what you receive is the lure you are going to win money. But the game is mathematically stacked against you and inevitably, you’ll lose in the end, especially if you keep gambling.
If you do win some money back, in most cases it comes at the expense and misery of many other people. And an ESPN story recently highlighted that in commercial sports betting, if you try to win, the bookmakers don’t let you place bets anymore.[iv] Bookmakers are severely restricting or closing accounts for the very fact that these people are winning!
“Let People Gamble If They Want,” You May Say
We already have the freedom to gamble. Up to now, many Americans participate in office pools for the Super Bowl, NCAA March Madness brackets, or make casual wagers on the golf course with their friends. These informal events are examples of social gambling.
Social gambling stands in contrast to state-sanctioned gambling, or predatory gambling, that—by design—is much less constrained. It happens when state governments partner with powerful corporate gambling interests to operate and market for-profit gambling to citizens and their communities.
In state-sanctioned gambling, there is a “house” skimming a large profit. It’s exempt from truth-in-advertising laws, giving states and gambling corporations wide latitude to market gambling, grossly exaggerate chances of winning and aggressively lure citizens to gamble away bigger sums of their cash. People often borrow money to participate. It goes on all day, every day of the week, year round. And it requires the majority of Americans who rarely gamble to subsidize the scheme with their own cash, footing the bill for the steep social costs and state budget problems it leaves behind.
One can be a libertarian on this, while at the same time, believing that we cross an unacceptable ethical line when we go from allowing individuals to gamble to allowing our government to set up a massive marketing and distribution scheme urging people to do so. Making a bet with a friend, that’s one thing, but if you do it against a sportsbook, you’re going to lose money all the time.
Illegal Gambling Tends to Increase When States Legalize Gambling
The primary source of information for the size and scope of illegal sports gambling in the U.S. has been the American Gaming Association, the national lobbying organization for gambling operators who have a vested financial interest in seeing commercialized gambling metastasize.
When gambling operators call for “regulation,” what they really mean is government granting monopolies and awarding regulatory advantages to favored firms.
Presently in the U.S., no illegal gambling operator is putting liens on the homes of citizens to collect gambling losses, like legal operators do. No illegal operator sends free gambling wagers by direct mail to your house to lure you back to the local casino, like legal operators do. No illegal operator is pushing $50 lottery scratch tickets, seven days a week, in economically-depressed communities, like state lotteries do. No illegal operators are running gambling ads during live broadcasts of sporting events with such intensity that one out of every five ads is to place a bet, which is what some of the legal sports gambling operators maneuvering here in the U.S. do in places like the United Kingdom.[v] No illegal operator is sponsoring pro sports teams, which involves team uniforms emblazoned with the names of gambling companies on them; stadium and arena surfaces where continuous gambling ads surround the game itself; and pre-match and post-match interviews, like the legal operators do in the U.K.[vi]
If the illegal sports gambling operators supposedly cannot be controlled right now, as the big commercial gambling operators claim, then how can you control and regulate the gambling operators you license? If you can’t shut down the illegal sports gambling operators now, how would you possibly shut down licensed operators who don’t follow the rules?
There are a number of other reasons why illegal gambling tends to increase when states sanction gambling. These include:
Untaxed illegal operators can offer better odds and tax avoidance that legal operations cannot.
Once gamblers start betting legally, they become less averse to gambling in unlicensed venues and websites.
Law enforcement in gambling states view illegal gambling as a state revenue issue rather than a criminal activity, making enforcement less of a priority.
Commercialized Sports Betting Severely Harms Kids and Will Radically Change the Way That Kids Consume Sports
Studies show that children in those countries with legal sports gambling are repeatedly exposed to harmful messages and advertisements about sports gambling.[vii] The frequency of sports gambling ads normalizes gambling for kids.[viii] These kids come to see gambling as central to playing and watching sports.[ix] Rather than talking about their favorite team, they talk about the odds of their team winning.
The younger children start gambling, the more likely it is they will become habitual and problem gamblers, regardless whether they are from an urban or a suburban community.[x]
Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health have published nearly a dozen papers on Baltimore youths and gambling.[xi] They found a strong link between gambling and other problems among the city’s youth. Other studies in the Johns Hopkins’ series found that gambling often leads to depression, crime, homelessness and joblessness in young adulthood.[xii]
When you talk about sports gambling in 2018, it means gambling on almost any kind of contest you can imagine:
In-play betting;
Betting on video games or eSports;
Betting on pop culture TV programs like The Bachelor and The Oscars;
And much of it is happening online in the form of online gambling.
Can you imagine allowing young people to gamble on video games? That’s where gambling operators, and their partners in state government, are leading this country unless Congress acts.
For the Majority of Americans Who Don’t Gamble, You Pay Even If You Don’t Play
Gambling lobbyists and some public officials continue to tout government-sanctioned gambling as a way to raise tax revenue. But history has shown repeatedly that this argument is either overstated or wrong. A 2016 national report by The Rockefeller Institute at SUNY-Albany found that while states creating new revenue streams from gambling may see momentary bumps in tax income, “the revenue returns deteriorate—and often quickly.”[xiii]
Beyond its obvious status as a budgetary shell game, government-sanctioned gambling incurs major social costs that end up being footed by all taxpayers. In addition to targeting and exploiting the financially desperate and cultivating addiction,[xiv][xv] government-sanctioned gambling leads to increases in rates of personal bankruptcy and provides new avenues for crime and money laundering.[xvi][xvii] Gambling operators don’t pay for the harms they cause families, businesses, and communities. Taxpayers do.
All the citizens who don’t gamble also pay another way. Government-sanctioned gambling lowers our national standard of living because it’s a sterile transfer of money from millions of ordinary people’s pockets into a small number of other people’s pockets, producing nothing new and nothing of lasting value. Its economic impact is similar to throwing your money on the street so someone else can pick it up – it redistributes wealth without creating it. Because this nonproductive activity nevertheless uses up time and resources, we experience a reduced national standard of living, a consequence that impacts all of us.
CONCLUSION
State governments are often called laboratories of democracy. But over the last 30 years, the record is clear: when it comes to gambling policy, states are laboratories of fraud, exploitation and budgetary shell games.
Without Congressional action, the American people are on a collision course to lose more than $1 trillion of wealth to government-sanctioned gambling over the next eight years. Widespread commercialized sports betting will make these financial losses even worse.
Public officials and opinion leaders who profess a desire to improve opportunity and alleviate poverty often lament how few levers they have to pull. Priority one needs to be to stop turning millions of people who are small earners, who could be small savers, into habitual bettors.
[ii] The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Vol. 1, May 2016, Issue 2, Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data, Pg. 554. http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2016QJE.pdf
[vii] Hannah Pitt et al., “It’s just everywhere!” Children and parents discuss the marketing of sports wagering in Australia,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 480, 485 (Oct. 2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27524502
