Rampant Sports Gambling Is a Stain on Our Country
America’s love of sports gambling will not be going away any time soon. Its devastating consequences have been well-cataloged—from apps that use morally dubious tactics to ensnare gambling addicts to the industry draining vast sums of money from the lower classes and the poor. Those who design sports betting apps have created algorithms of addiction that exploit existing sinful tendencies and also create new ones.
All of this combines to corrode the very citizen character that’s a prerequisite for republican government as well as drive a wedge between man and God. What nations formed in the cradle of Western civilization once relegated to seedy private establishments is now promoted during nearly every commercial break in every NFL game.
Like the transgender craze, the full effects of legalizing 24/7 online sports gambling in most states will likely only be widely acknowledged later on—and I just hope that what the Supreme Court unleashed in 2018 will not be irreversible.
But don’t tell that to The Economist, the neoliberal British journal founded by the Scottish banker James Wilson in 1843. In a recent piece titled “America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared,” the journal revels in the explosion of gambling in the U.S. The editors see this not as an omen of a culture in decline but as a testament to unrestrained liberty. America is to be applauded, we are told, for rejecting its “puritanical past” in favor of expanding “people’s freedom to lead their lives as they choose.” Unmoored freedom—or what the American founders would call license—in this telling is a great good—perhaps even the summum bonum of human life. But in reality, it’s yet another sign that Western civilization is locked into a suicidal spiral of its own making.
The Economist notes that “[G]ambling into a mammoth business.” “Americans are on track to wager nearly $150bn on sports,” it gleefully reports, up an astounding $143 billion from 2018. As the piece continues, “Americans may wager as much as $630bn online by the end of the decade, quadrupling gambling companies’ revenues from sports-betting and virtual casinos.”
Though The Economist worries about the possible effects of the speed at which gambling was legalized in America, obliterating moral guardrails doesn’t truly seem to bother the journal. After all, there are inevitably going to be some individuals who are going to be steamrolled on the way to a libertine Randian paradise. Or, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson infamously put it in the lead-up to the 2016 election, “dysfunctional, downscale communities…deserve to die.”
But The Economist’s cheery report is betrayed by more and more data that clearly show the deleterious consequences online sports gambling is unleashing, which is further exacerbated due to it being accessible 24/7 on a smartphone.
The Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman demonstrates what should be obvious: legalizing vice on a massive scale has led to yet even more vice. And online sports gambling affects the people who can least afford it. “The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery,” writes Lehman, “one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households.”
He cites one study that found that legalized sports betting increases the likelihood of bankruptcy by 28%. Another paper, this one from the University of Oregon, shows that “sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence”—and that’s above an already 10% increase in domestic violence due to an NFL team’s upset loss that an earlier study found.
A study from Northwestern University shows that legalized sports gambling drains household savings, which are already in a precarious state for many Americans. Estimates are that about 27% of U.S. households have no savings; unsurprisingly, nearly 50% of those with an income under $50,000 per year have nothing in their savings accounts.
The NU study also found that “for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts,” Lehman notes. This is all the more important considering that Social Security’s trust fund reserves are going to run out by 2035 (though that program will continue to pay out after that year, though in gradually decreasing amounts).
Additionally, Lehman points out that states are seeing “big increases in the risk of overdrafting a bank account or maxing out a credit card.” Exactly how this is consistent with the purported concerns of the Left (a big booster of loosening all traditional moral restrictions) over wealth inequality and the plight of the poor is anyone’s guess.
Even if these myriad negative consequences were outweighed by a substantial payoff, Lehman shows that this has yet to materialize. As “anxiety, depression, and even suicide” have increased, tax revenues have been “anemic.” The 38 states and the District of Columbia where sports gambling is available (Missouri legalized it in November, but it won’t go into effect until late next year) have only generated $500 million in combined revenue per quarter, which Lehman says is less than what’s being brought in by alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana.
And that revenue is being drawn mostly from a very small slice of gamblers. Southern Methodist University released a study in June that found in a survey of over 700,00 gamblers that though 80% had losses, just 3% accounted for nearly 50% of those losses.
As reported by Bloomberg, states that have legalized online casino gambling like blackjack and slots are also seeing an uptick in “irresponsible gambling” and significantly more “gambling helpline calls” compared with states that have not okayed this form of online gambling. And unsurprisingly, “Low-income gamblers are most likely to increase irresponsible gambling after policy changes.”
Sports betting titans FanDuel and DraftKings, along with Caesars Entertainment, which are the official sports betting partners of the NFL, have quickly become notorious vehicles for exploiting peoples’ worst instincts. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal featured a shocking story about a Pennsylvania psychologist, Kavita Fischer, who won and then lost $500,000 on PointsBet with the help of VIP hosts egging her on. Even more recently, a DraftKing’s user from New Jersey lost $1 million due to the same traps and enticements, even gambling away money that his two children received from Christmas and baptisms.
Pro bettors themselves game the online sports betting system because they understand the addictive nature of the apps. On his “How Gambling Works” Substack, Isaac Rose-Berman described how one professional bettor logs into “his accounts every day between 2 and 4 a.m., to make it seem like he can’t get through the night without checking his bets. Another withdraws money and then reverses those withdrawals so it looks like he can’t resist gambling.”
In an excellent monologue on the manifest problems introduced by online sports gambling, Saagar Enjeti of the online daily politics show Breaking Points has three solutions: follow the U.K. and only legalize in-person sports gambling, institute fairness rules in betting organizations where everyone has an actual possibility of winning (and where the best bettors are not stifled), and look into the nexus between the NFL and the sports gambling industry. He forcefully concludes, “The damage gambling companies have wrought, and will continue to do to America’s families, poses a direct threat to our country.”
Of course, what Enjeti sketches out are short-term measures for a negative world. Christians must do what they can to help gamblers who are entangled in sin and, eventually, help shut down the sports gambling industry altogether. Pastors need to preach against the various sins that naturally flow from sports betting. Ministries should be established to help online sports gamblers repent and leave that world behind.
Meanwhile, Republicans, who finally seem to be recognizing the moral aspect of politics, need to act. And just because Congress can’t accomplish something isn’t an excuse to let it slide—the state and local levels can be part of the solution too.
Reestablishing a Christian culture that restrains vice and promotes virtue should be the aim of those looking to stop America’s long-term slide into moral anarchy.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Thank you for writing about the harm of gambling and, in this case, sports gambling. It is always a disappointment to see a long-time revered sports hero in sports gambling commercials.
IMO, gambling, especially the recent popularity in online sports gambling, is an extension of the consumer mindset that prides itself on what and how much it consumes and gains little to no significance from what one contributes to others.
Should someone send a car to Curt’s house to check on him? Is this non-critical, charitable reading of an article some sort of coded S.O.S.?
No, he has a select few topics he agrees with. Notice how he still he still inserted his own opinion, though.
Andrew,
Inserting my own opinion is wrong?
There are a lot of insults thrown my way. And what they have in common is that they refuse to deal with specific points bring up. And so those comments are irrational.