The Guardian newspaper ran a piece the other day about the plethora of sportsbooks popping up in America since the US Supreme Court overturned laws banning online gambling in 2018, and especially since the National Football League approved gambling ads during its live broadcasts of games.
In The Guardian piece, which ran on its US site and attracted hundreds of Comments, writer Aaron Timms describes an encounter with an old friend from his native Australia whom he’s met for a drink in New York; the friend constantly is checking his phone for the play-by-play of a European football match between Switzerland’s national team and powerhouse Spain.
Who’ll score the first goal; what will the score be at the half; what will the final score be – his friend even egged Aaron on to make his own bets.
This was not an article about one man’s descent into gambling hell, though, but that of a nation’s. We’re becoming a nation of gambling addicts in the United States, just as Timms alleges has happened in Australia. That was the point of the article and I agree, as did almost all the readers commenting on the article. This cancer is destroying Aaron’s native country, he believes, and now it’s coming for us. Well, it’s already here, isn’t it?
Up to 45 million Americans are expected to place bets on pro football games during the 2021 season (see details here.) You may know the NFL for its free use of publicly funded stadiums in many cities across the country, or perhaps its recent conversion to a host of social justice issues (its flash on the road to Damascus is not dissimilar to St. Paul’s), but now you should know it as the linchpin between sports and gambling in America.
One estimate puts sports betting overall at $150 billion annually, but that’s only land-based, legal sports betting, while the growth in online sportsbooks was 650 percent in the second quarter this year compared to the second quarter in 2019 (see details here and here). Off-shore sites may handle yet more money. The ponies account for about $12 billion in wagers annually – I don’t know if that number has been folded into the larger sum above or is in addition to it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a lot of money.
Then there are state and multi-state lotteries – the best estimate of money spent on these chimeras was $29 billion in 2019 and accelerating faster than North Korea’s missile program, according to the reliable Statista site (see details here.) And, according to the United States Census Bureau, the “average” American spends $230 a year on lottery tickets. I could do the math for an estimated 330 million people residing in this country and see if it matches Statista’s figure, but I don’t think my calculator can go that high. In any case, it’s a lot of money, like I said.
Not all that money is lost, of course, but most people do lose. A Business Insider report found that nearly 90 percent of gamblers lose. The article and the study cited were a few years old, however, so maybe gamblers have since learned, you know, how to defeat the Law of Large Numbers, which is ultimately what guarantees that “the house” must win in most schemes over time. (See details here.)
STAND AND DELIVER
None of the above numbers is the most salient. Here are some numbers that really matter. To quote Scientific American, “Various surveys have determined that around two million people in the U.S. are addicted to gambling, and for as many as 20 million citizens the habit seriously interferes with work and social life.” This report also is a few years old but I doubt the situation has improved since, especially with the advent of online, real-time gambling and heavy television promotion. (See details here.)
Now, here’s the requisite disclaimer: The IRS takes a cut of any gambler’s substantial winnings, and state lotteries also generate revenue. I can find estimates for just how much but I don’t care and you shouldn’t either. We are literally stripping some citizens of their wealth to help others in a way that is worse than Peter robbing Paul.
Ditto for the claims that legal gambling employs so-and-so many people. There are enough unfilled job vacancies to go around in this country that we don’t need to be carving up addicts’ lives just to find jobs for other people. Here – concentration camps provided employment opportunities, too. This is an extreme and ugly analogy, for sure, but it helps make the point.
JAMIE FOXX IS SCARY GOOD
I don’t follow Hollywood much and I can’t tell who’s a good actor just from watching an occasional late-night TV interview. But I know who Jamie Foxx is and I’ve seen his ads for BetMGM. He’s coming out of a mist right at me; his eyes are smart-bomb brilliant and they’ve targeted my brain; now he’s telling me to get off my ass and show who I really am by putting my money where my mouth is. And I almost do it! He’s hypnotic. He probably could get me to vote for, well, I don’t want to say who, but let’s just say he could get me to vote for the worst possible candidate in the next general election.
Flash! I’m watching the evening local news as I write this and a Fanduel ad just came on, and it seems to be a joint promotion with the NFL. Nah, I’m not buying it. I want Jamie Foxx.
Yeah, most people lose, whether it’s lose their shirt, lose their house, or lose their family. That’s the real cost of gambling, the human toll. I won’t go into any bleeding heart sob story here, but a life is a terrible thing to waste, right?
Yet so many lives are torn apart by gambling. So, before I forget, I’ll provide a go-to number for gambling assistance. You can sometimes find this or another number at the bottom of the screen for gambling ads on TV if you look fast, or if you have a magnifying glass you might see a number in small type at the bottom of a print ad. Thank you, thank you, Gambling Industry, from the bottom of my heart! Here’s the number.
The National Council of Problem Gambling – 800-522-4700 (this national number took me to an Indiana hotline; not sure where it will take you) or chat at ncpgambling.org/chat
There’s also gamblersanonymous.org, a 12-step program
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