Meanwhile Mr POTUS himself wants to introduce prop betting in his social media platform.
Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon
Addiction Markets
271–280 of 479 posts
Re: Addiction Markets
#272The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion. These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully? Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.
Absolutely. A lot of it is upsettingly simple; make a given population wealthy, well-educated, with a strong community and you will slash rates of these issues tenfold. My home state of New Hampshire is one of the wealthiest, best-educated states in the US and despite easy access to tons of dangers (unlimited gun access, some of the cheapest vodka prices in the Western world, legal gambling, et cetera) we have low rates of the associated disorders. The NH homicide rate is on par with much of Europe, for example, nearly unheard of for a US state.
Re: Addiction Markets
#273Meanwhile Mr POTUS himself wants to introduce prop betting in his social media platform. Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon
The president wants to let people gamble on election results on a platform he owns.
Which is a fun novel conflict of interest because he’s also ultimately the executive in charge of making sure national elections are properly conducted.
Since this is the direction America is going, why not have judges take bets on the outcome of trials? Would be a nice income stream for them, and it would save taxpayer money when judges don’t need to be paid anymore.
Re: Addiction Markets
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainm…
>> Gambling has a negative expected value Subscribing to Netflix has a negative expected value. Ban Netflix.
Even more so are restaurants exploiting the public with over priced food compared to cooking at home. Food that is so good that it is addictive.
Restaurants are immoral too since think of the negative health consequences they cause exploiting this situation with their addictive substances. They even put more butter than necessary in the food to make it more addictive.
The wait staff treated literally like servants.
"We should ban everything besides things I personally find enjoyable"
Re: Addiction Markets
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damning which way, though? Are gambling taxes too high, or are corporate taxes too low? And since corporate income is surely higher than gambling income, I’m inclined to think that gambling taxes are too high AND corporate taxes are too low, creating this odd fact. Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but i…
When you lose (most people, most of the time), you don't have to pay tax on winnings because there aren't any. But gambling itself seems like sort of a regressive tax that preys upon those susceptible to gambling. Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on…
There is a theory that talk of "those susceptibile" to gambling is in fact astroturfing by gambling corporations to make it seem like they're only damaging the weak willed.
And you're not weak willed are you? So nothing to worry about. Bad things only happen to bad people.
Re: Addiction Markets
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah the sweet spot is to make the gambling companies pay for the treatment and recovery of the people addicted to their products, up to whatever amount they gave the gambling company.
I wonder could this be expanded to other areas. Say you run a ski-resort. Any broken bones and other issues are fully on you. To unlimited liability, piercing any corporate setup. Could really work for any sports too. Food, tobacco, alcohol get more interesting... As there is bit harder time to assign blame of each meal. Maybe in those cases the claimants should be able to fully list everything they have ingested ove…
Don't be intentionally daft. Skiing and sports aren't notably addictive, and don't notably cause harm in society.
Re: Addiction Markets
#277It feels like banning advertising for gambling would be a sweet spot between harm reduction and maintaining individual liberty. Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
Tax advertising for gambling? Require all advertising for gambling to go through a state agency? There is lots a state can do besides banning.
> Tax advertising
That move alone would make a big dent in many of the major problems of modern living.
Re: Addiction Markets
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regressive taxes can be counterbalanced by redistributive policies. Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue. The issue is sales taxes disincentivize consumption whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling.
> whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling. Do they, though? The vig is 10%, very transparently shown in the odds, and paid immediately. It proves very little disincentive. The tax is paid annually and only if you win; for most people, it is 0%. Are we really going to argue that the tax is a serious factor in discouraging the behavior?
When you describe a tax that is "paid annually and only if you win", that's plain generic income tax.
That's not the gambling-activity-specific taxes that Stoller's article discusses - typically applied to gambling businesses' revenues, not bet winners specifically.
Re: Addiction Markets
#279What really struck me is how gambling has quietly become infrastructure. That's a deeply unsettling shift.
Re: Addiction Markets
#280But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes. A fraction of the proceeds of losing bets from a fraction of Maryland's citizens contributes almost the same to state services -- EMS, education, road maintenance, etc -- than the total corporate taxes…
A state is funding essential public services not through productive economic activity, but by extracting money from people losing bets