New York needs to consider the perilous seductions of online sports betting
In 2020, New York state will likely face a staggering $6 billion budget shortfall. How will Albany make up the deficit? You can bet it won’t involve many spending cuts. Instead, the Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo will likely engage in artful bookkeeping while inventing new ways to tax New Yorkers.
That’s politics as usual. But it’s also possible that they will succumb to the same temptation as their counterparts in New Jersey and legalize online, app-based sports betting. That’s a mistake.
In its first year since legalizing smart-device sports betting, the Garden State raked in $194.1 million. That’s a drop in the state’s sea of red ink. But it still makes Trenton the nation’s leading legal bookie, and with the help of massive advertising budgets aimed at making gambling sound like an entertaining way to get rich while watching sports, the revenue will likely grow.
So will the enormous toll in suffering inflicted on individuals and families as a result of gambling addiction. And that’s why the Empire State shouldn’t be suckered into making the same mistake by starting its own online sports-book business.
The arguments in favor of profiting from legalized gambling have always proved irresistible to politicians, who see it as an easy way to subsidize government spending. It started in the 1960s, when New Yorkers were told that a lottery would pay for public education.
Advocates for state-run betting also have a point when they assert that it’s better for the revenue to go to the government than to criminals who provide venues for such betting whenever it is illegal.
But as a new study from the Council on Compulsive Gambling in New Jersey, first reported by The Post, points out, the app-based option has doubled the number of people calling into a hotline to say they had a gambling problem.
Though such calls are merely the tip of the iceberg, this is hardly surprising. As a Rutgers University study that came out before this form of gambling was legalized showed, the easier you make it for people to gamble, the more likely they are to do so compulsively — far beyond their means — and fall into the trap of addiction.
The same study also showed that those who engage in online gambling are even more unlikely to understand that the odds are against them than are those who make the trek to a casino — which is still the only form of legalized gambling outside of the lottery and horse betting in New York.
Giving people a digital casino in their pockets makes it that much more likely that those who play will get into trouble with very little effort — in ways that dwarf the opportunities for such addiction with other forms of gambling.
The government isn’t forcing anyone to gamble, to be sure, let alone gamble compulsively. Sports betting, whether in the form of fantasy games or more traditional wagers, will happen whether the state gets involved or not. Yet app-based betting preys on those prone to such addiction in a way that no other form of gambling does.
The governor and the Legislature need to think not only about the moral implications of doing something that is certain to result in more addicted gamblers broken by the problem. The cost of such catastrophes are not only borne by those involved and their families.
Like all social pathologies, gambling addiction leads to increases in crime, divorce as well as more people requiring public assistance. Enabling this kind of wagering is also the most regressive form of taxation imaginable — and more likely to hurt lower income New Yorkers far more than those in the upper brackets.
This seems like an easy way for the state to fill its coffers with another sin tax. But creating more addicted gamblers is terrible social policy and the wrong thing to do. Albany should continue to say no to a scheme that will create far more misery than fun or tax revenue.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org. Twitter: @jonathanS_Tobin
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