Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake

Gambling is perhaps the most egregious example of a naked wealth transfer from the poor to the rich

Second only to landlording
- I love that all of this started when a couple of techbros started illegal fantasy football betting apps, made a shitload of money by further impoverishing the impoverished, then used their ill gotten gains to buy off legislators. Now i am sure they are billionaires, instead of what they deserve which is execution
  Uber basically proved you could operate any app outside the law with impunity. Shit rules.
- Is wage labor not naked enough?

My response to that is "well I enjoy being a hater".

it's driving me nuts lol. sorry to debatelord but clearly people learned that drug prohibition doesn't work (true) and are drawing a complete false equivalency here.
- Also drug prohibition did worked in socialism so there is yet another layer of liberal-churned grey matter on it.

Yes

Also, lotteries are horrid and seeing them used to fund basic state functions makes me gag.

I heard somewhere, I wanna say
that the idea that lotteries fund schools isn't even true.
Like, if property tax generated X dollars for local schools, and then a lottery was introduced that produced Y dollars, instead of schools now getting X+Y dollars, they still get X and you either give Y amount of dollars from the budget to something we don't want to say the lottery is funding, like police budgets or something, since the dollars are all fungible, or you reduce property taxes by Y dollars.
Meaning that generally, what it actually does, rather than providing a new revenue stream for your kid's school, is move the tax burden from the rich to the poor.
- Episode 63: Gambling and Neoliberal Rot - How Our Most Regressive Tax Flies Under the Radar

And the ads are fucking everywhere. Entire train stations with every square inch of advertising space plastered with Jamie Foxx or whatever washed up scumbag piece of shit actor they could find.

Episode 206: How the Gambling Industry Swallowed Sports Media Whole

Lmao, I just started listening to this and they immediately compare it to legalizing heroin and giving control of the heroin industry to tobacco companies, with the implication that that would obviously be incredibly bad.
Turns out half the people in this thread think that that's a great idea actually.
- Oh my God then they started talking about self-identified socialists now having a libertarian streak and thinking restrictions on people's actions by a Nanny State are bad.
- It's a lot less than half, judging by the upvotes. Still, didn't expect this to be controversial at all.

the betting industry is ruining lives...

I'm glad I dont know a single thing about sports so I can't be tricked into blowing all my cash on the Buccs

I forget the exact stats on it, but gambling addiction is especially destructive to people's lives even compared with other major addictions. Also, on a petty treat-fiend note, it has made sports so much fucking shittier.

there's a good (extremely bleak) trueanon on this ep 209 , also they recommended a book that sounds great addiction by design haven't read but on my list a while

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
yewtu.be
inv.nadeko.net
yt.artemislena.eu
piped.video

I also saw this. I wonder how much the legal gambling also just opened up pandoras box. I think that a lot of people, especially whales, end up on offshore sites anyways because of better odds and less overall rake. And of course there are also underground sportsbooks still for the biggest players, like Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter who got caught gambling millions of stolen money this spring.

And also, even in CA there are "fantasy games" (tickpick, underdog, even jake paul is affiliated with one of them) and there are "social gambling" sites that use the "sweepstakes" loophole, such as fliff sportsbook and chumba casino. These ones, you pay money for a "fun currency" and you also get "sweeps cash" that is basically a premium currency on their site that can be gambled for real cash. But even the off shore sites are pretty heavily advertised on social media, such as stake and bovada.

Regardless of the actual mechanisms of gambling that are available in your state, the prevalence of the advertising is nauseating. Draftkings/mgm/fanduel ads are all over sports stadiums. Beyond that though, some channels, especially ESPN, show tons of actual odds during their broadcast alongside an ad for their own platform, espnbet. The massive influx of gambling money is tainting sports overall.

Im glad my favorite sports franchise has yet to take any gambling ads, but still when they have a game on ESPN i have to put up with the odds bullshit, in addition to everything else that is total garbage about that channel.

Also, players themselves are being harassed on the field and online by people blaming them for a bet that didnt hit. Some players even received cash app requests to pay back a bet that they ruined.

I dont think it will be banned in mosr states, but congress should have the power to at least curb the advertising specifically, because that should fall under interstate commerce.

I live in CA, a state that still hosts a lottery, another form of expooitative gambling that should be banned or severely restricted. No need to have slot machines on paper at every gas station and convenience store.

congress should have the power to at least curb the advertising specifically
All advertisement needs to be banned

I think the question to ask about this is why it's such a unique problem to america. Much like guns.

Here in the UK 15% of men do online gambling and 4% of women. Ok so the top line of data says that 40% of people do gambling but this is only because of scratchcards at petrol stations. When you remove these it drops to 15 and 4.

Why is this situation so significantly worse in america? What is unique about american society and culture that causes 33% of americans to be betting on sports, let alone other stuff?

Supreme court struck down a law banning sports gambling in 2018 on the logic that "illegal gambling is already happening, might as well make it legal and cut out the criminals!". The now-legal betting companies started pushing a non-stop torrent of pro-gambling ads immediately.
Australia is also pretty bad, see below:
- So is the problem marketing?
  I don't know what differences lie in the marketing that is allowed here vs US.
Its also a major issue elsewhere. Australia for example has a pretty horrific gambling problem and the government rolled back promises to ban gambling advertising.
40%+ of people gambling on scratchoffs or the lottery is also quite bad tbh
I don't know about the societal effects but you might want to consider if it's just normalized, not actually better
- I really don't think spending a quid once a week on a scratchcard is much of an issue though.
Our brains our broken. I don't know how else to put it. They turn us into husks. Myself included.
I wonder if it's a case of them not really having culturally/socially adjusted to it like everyone else has. .
That and there's also a lot more sports going on that are insanely popular/that people are engaged with. Here it's mostly just football and horses. There its NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA and to a lesser extent: MLS, WNBA and NASCAR.
- Maybe partially? It's been legal here since the 60s.
"Capitalism with American Characteristics" is a disease that is poisoning every part of society. I believe it breeds desperation and a "fuck it" attitude and drives people to reckless behavior, aggression, and distrust of others.
I'm not immune. I kind of hate most people, especially here. Society sucks, most people suck.
- Capitalism with American Characteristics
  I think this is an interesting thing to discuss. Honestly we could do this for a lot of countries but for America especially. It's probably useful to normalise talking this way about socialism too.
Spanish here, absolutely not a unique problem to the US of A. Betting joints popped up EVERYWHERE some 5-10 years ago
The UK is going to get a lot worse with all the betting advertising in football. Pretty much every second Premier League team has a betting sponsor at the moment. The marketing campaign has intensified and I can see those statistics doubling within the next few years.
Nor exclusive of the US, Brazil is loosing billions of dollars each year to that.

Sports people are more concerning to me than gamers.

- I’ve never seen a gamer eat literal shit as a celebratory act.
Oh no is it time for this struggle session again

https://archive.ph/OyaEf

Also,

making gambling illegal is harm reduction.

Sports should be illegal. Why? For sustainability. Athletes eat like 4x as much as a normal person. That's a lot of fucking food. And what for? So they can run or throw a ball? Who the fuck cares the planet is dying

4 replies taking this obvious joke at least semi seriously lol i love this website
- obvious joke
  You clearly haven't been here long if you think this is obviously a joke
I think the chartered flights and massive construction projects are probably a bit worse.
You gotta remember they, they dont just run and throw balls. Sometimes they kick or hit the balls. And most importantly, they all go shower together afterwards with their beefy sweaty shiny bodies
- beefy sweaty shiny bodies
  see, that's another point, to save the earth we need to cut beef production!
A vegan athlete has a smaller {water, land use, carbon} footprint than a meat eater who lays around all day.
- and? a vegan athlete will still use 10x the calories and nutrition of a non athlete
There are also many non athletes who eat 4x the normal amount
- You're right and i wish to restrict that as well
  I at least think it's reasonable to tell people to take one serving and keep it moving and come back for seconds if they want them but we're not supposed to do that. So im just perma stressed that these kids are gonna take "all you can eat" as a challenge and I'll run out of food every night because I can't just make infinite food and waste the excess
Hard agree, sports are for children.

It's also ruining sports, the advertising is everywhere and extremely tacky, while contributing to the financial ruin of the poorest in society. If I see another HollywoodBets advert I will

Specifically, for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts. States see big increases in the risk of overdrafting a bank account or maxing out a credit card. These effects are strongest among already precarious households.

Fake society with fake finance. This is terrible.

Looking specifically at online sports gambling, they find that legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. These problems seem to concentrate among young men living in low-income counties—further evidence that those most hurt by sports gambling are the least well-off.

Yeah definitely. I see it all the time with soccer/football.

Matsuzawa and Arnesen extend this, finding that in states where sports betting is legal, the effect is even bigger. They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence.

...

Legalization isn’t yielding many benefits, either. Tax revenue—one of the major justifications for legalization—has been anemic, with all 38 legal states combined making only about $500 million from it a quarter, less than alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana

Of course, these gambling operations are great at avoiding taxes, setting up their operation to be off shore on official paperwork, in office buildings that don't exist.

Gambling is only cool when it's largely illegal

This would've been alright if you still had to like go to an official to place bets. The problem is there's a fucking casino in your pocket now and they've been given free reign to advertise to everyone on everything

nah, any bookie or house or casino needs to go. There shouldn't be any "officials" allowed to take bets whatsoever, as this leads to gambling industry. Small scale bets between individuals is fine, but once a house is involved and taking a cut it's crossed the line
- i mean i agree, obviously gambling is inherently predatory when there's a house.
  my thought is mostly that the concept of "legalizing sports betting" is one thing, while legalizing pocket casinos and smashing you across the head with advertising is another.
  like hell, at least if you had to go to a bookie it's something to do, you're getting out of the fucking house. this is just sitting on your ass and pissing your money away without even a walk outside to speak of. it's bleak

Feel like making illegal doesn't necessarily solve the problem either. Best thing to do would be banning advertising and heavily regulating apps - no notifications etc.

making gambling illegal is harm reduction actually. it's not a direct equivalency with drugs. you can make moonshine in your bathtub without detection, the govt has the power to shut down corporate gambling operations and I would bet ;) that most customers won't bother moving to the underground option. (which can also be shut down much more easily than a drug ring) it is harm reduction. I don't know why so many people feel the need to defend its existence here.
- Not really defending its existence, more trying to figure out what the best solution is.
  I think you have a good point though.
Plenty of places in the world where gambling industries are banned, and it works pretty well.

Of all the bad shit Temer (who came to power after Dilma's coup) did in Brazil, legalizing sports betting without any kind of regulation is probably the worst.

Any economic gain Brazil had after COVID have been funneled out to those sites. Can only hope Lula do something about it soon.

legalizing it is fine IMO, it's probably better than black market gambling. but the ads being everywhere is terrible. advertising cigarettes on tv is illegal, should be the same for gambling

Death to America

For profit sports betting operations should absolutely not be legal. Gambling on your smart phone, which is already an addicting dopamine machine, should absolutely not be legal.
libertarian brain claims another victim
- it's so prevalent in american leftists lol
haven't watched the video, but right now in Brazil legalized sports gambling is such a menace that its driving a substantial portion of the poorest into debt. influencer driven online scams are one thing, but sports gambling goes to the heart of what little community we have left via sports.
Marketing should be punishable by death

I don't gamble and am actively repulsed by how it's being pushed as hip and cool. That said, I'm surprised by the hardline abolition stances in here. Drugs (including alcohol) are surely far more corrosive to people's wellbeing, but no one on here is arguing for prohibition, right?

in a true utopian vision there would be little to no want for any of these things. I agree drug prohibition sucks but prohibition of drugs is different to prohibition of gambling. it's hard to stop people making bathtub moonshine. gambling prohibition is harm reduction if done right because a small wager between friends is relatively harmless + ideally in socialism or whatever your buddy won't be set up to take 10 grand bets off you and all your friends on the game. I'm largely a drug liberationist too but you need some control or at least oversight + intervention mechanisms. and I still believe in a utopian vision where all those vices will be more or less transcended. in end stage communism there will not be liquor stores where you can buy 2 litres of vodka at 4am, that's harmful. I'm an alcoholic so maybe I do have contradictory views on this but I just deeply believe it's a societal ill same as gambling. other drugs it's more of a case by case basis. largely they are still bad, this is a lesson the left should have learned since the 1960s. but again in communism ideally people aren't feeling the need to get strung out on heroin that shit is a palliative for living in capitalism. so when it comes to drugs it's more of a utopian transcending the thing but gambling could be effectively tamped down under socialism. even under capitalism it's probs better if it's outlawed tbh. sorry it's unstructured and probably repeated myself just typed my thoughts up very fast.
- No your perspective is really helpful actually. Definitely agree on both being societal ills. I've just started working around a bunch of people going through really hard times w/ drugs and have my own unresolved childhood trauma related to it, so this has been slowly creeping up on me for the past couple months.
  I just see the harm it causes people everyday and then people seem to just kinda dismiss it as unimportant versus gambling. That's an uncharitable representation of that opinion but it's the way it came across to me.
The opioid epidemic has made a lot of people, myself included, skeptical of anti-prohibition. Turns out pushing something underground often does have the effect of making it more expensive and inconvenient to access. There some study I can't find now, but it claimed legalizing prostitution actually increased human trafficking because now traffickers could mask their operations as legal sex work opening them up to new clientele they normally wouldn't have access to. I suspect there's a lot of men who would be going to brothels regularly if it was as easy as going to 7/11 but don't want to go to the bad side of town to pick up a sex workers who could be a cop doing a sting.
Same with drugs, going from a system where you had to import raw opium from Afghanistan or wherever to the west via camel and make shift submarine, then process and distribute it clandestinely, made being a heroin addict and expensive pain in the ass. Now you can buy pills made semi-legally in a factory in Mexico that some guy got prescribed to him by a shady Floridian doctor for a broken ankle he had 10 years ago.
Prohibition didn't work for weed and booze cuz both of those are things easy to make and distribute even when they're illegal, plus they're both easier to consume, and even abuse, while being a functional member do society. I think there are vices thought where you could reduce the consumption and abuse of just by making it a big fucking pain in the ass to get access to and gambling I think is one of them.
- There some study I can't find now, but it claimed legalizing prostitution actually increased human trafficking because now traffickers could mask their operations as legal sex work opening them up to new clientele they normally wouldn't have access to.
  That's interesting—on the other hand, I know of one case where the shuttering of a sex work website due to human trafficking charges (which Kamala Harris lead the charge on, as it happens) actually made a lot of sex workers feel less safe. Article here.
  It's not quite the same concept, but thought it was worth mentioning.
  And yeah I think making gambling less accessible and less visible is good. But then, shouldn't we also do the same for alcohol and drugs, just up to the point where it's still easier to get them legally than illegally?
- I respect that! At least it's consistent
I think dangerous drugs should be prohibited.
You think drugs should just be freely available to the public? All of them? You wouldn't prohibit meth? Heroin? Cocaine?
- Are we talking about prohibition or restriction? I fully support restrictions on dangerous drugs, but hasn't it been consistently shown that outlawing vices entirely doesn't stop their consumption and just makes it more dangerous (especially for poor people)?
  If we're basing this off danger, then alcohol is the much more immediate concern given how easily available and culturally accepted it is while still being quite bad for you
- You think drugs should just be freely available to the public?
  I do. A lot of the danger of drugs is mitigated by quality control and education.
For me there should be no abolition, but what has happened is a few predatory companies given free rein to exploit vulnerable people. There were offshore bookies and stuff before, but the level of exploitation (through advertising on mainstream sports networks, not to mention online ads) is unreal and definitely created this problem.
- And it's crazy how it all sprang up like mushrooms too. Banning ads like they did with cigarettes would help but the cat is already somewhat out of the bag for people who have gotten hooked

Wtf is my alcoholic gambling addict brother supposed to do? Pull himself up by his personal responsibility and yeet his phone, tv, and internet into the sun?
Because those things are full of fucking predatory gambling app advertisements.
- Heaven forbid someone likes sports and tries to stop gambling too considering every ad break during sports games is for a betting app
  Hell I've seen them plastered over subways and other places, so even touching grass won't help
  Gambling delenda est
I don't want a state to tell me what I can and can't do with my personal life as long as I'm not doing harm to anyone else.
Here's why this take is wrong. Gambling is never a "I'm not doing harm to anyone else" situation. Gambling is always a material relationship between 2 people or more people. You may feel like gambling is a personal situation because of alienation, but it is not. If you are playing a slot machine for example, you are in a material relationship with the slot machine owner. In this situation, the slot machine owner has a power advantage over you and is exploiting you. In cases of sportsbetting or card games, you are doing material transfers between people over arbitrary terms and the casino owner is always taking a cut. Gambling is always harming someone else. If you win at gambling, it is because you harmed someone else. If you lose at gambling, then it is because someone else harmed you.
To go further into why into why gambling is an exploitative relationship. Gambling is a transfer of unearned value. Money is a representation of value. Value comes from performing labor. When you are a proletarian and sell your labor, you are receiving money (a material representation of value) in exchange for your labor, usually the money you receive is worth less than the value of labor you performed. When you gamble, you are not doing any labor (you are not producing anything) but you are potentially receiving money. You receive money from speculation. In selling your labor, you receive value equal or less than the value you produce with labor. In gambling, you receive value for producing no value. This is the same reason why the bourgeoisie is a parasitic class, because they extract value without producing value.
- This pretty much answers the thread right here
This sounds like libertarianism
- My views put me somewhere between a Marxist-Leninist and Libertarian Socialist. I want the masses to own the means of production, and a state that enables people more than it restricts them. Longer reasoning coming.
"Everyone person should have the right to make a bad deal for themselves" is the logic of the Lochner court decisions. They said the government shouldn't stop anyone who chooses to work in a hazardous workplace, or sign a contract that says you won't join a union or choose to put their 12 year old children to work in mines.
Our laws have to protect people, otherwise we're just doing libertarianism.
- Our laws should protect people from doing harm to others. I couldn't care less if someone wants to smoke themselves to death. I care a lot if that person is near me blowing second-hand smoke at my face!
So when a father of 3 with a wife gambles away the house, it's just his problem right?
- Why ban gambling when you can just create conditions where its not possible to ruin your life by gambling. Like can't gamble away your house if its community managed. Cannot impoverish 'your' kids if they're not dependent on a nuclear family.
- Obviously it's not just his problem. However, that would hold the same if it was to fuel his drinking habit, but we don't propose banning alcohol because of that, right?
alcohol and gambling are indisputable societal ills and should be phased out in any kind of utopian vision. this is just libertarianism
- and at the very least, until they are fully phased out, could be subjected to harm reduction measures (eg mandatory riboflavin supplementation in all alcoholic drinks, severe limits on advertisement of gambling apps, time spent gambling, elimination of gambling-adjacent features in children's games among others)
are you even a socialist? if you can't reduce social ills what is even the point of your ideology? some half-baked individualist "i can do nothing all day"?
When you look at the range of people that gamble, it's not exactly something you ever see "in moderation" very much.
- That's not a good reason to ban something.