The Lotto was big here in Mississippi until they legalized sports betting…..the casinos starting raking in big bucks and then they legalized electronic sports betting and the flood gates were opened wide.

There is a wealth of sites and apps that allow you to throw your money away….FanDuel, Draft king, et, etc….all this easy access will come back and bite you in the ass.

This is heading for a crisis…..for a ‘fool and his money are soon parted’…..

America is a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires trapped by the billionaire class. We wax poetic about democracy and meritocracy inside of a top-down controlled world, telling ourselves a fantasy about what this country is while ignoring what it proves itself to be–all as myriad crises fester far from the consequences faced by the capitalist class. Perhaps that’s why sports are so popular. They are the lone part of America that is actually centered around meritocratic ideals (just so long as you don’t kneel before the national anthem).

And make no mistake, legalized sports gambling is one of those many crises plaguing this country. Charles Fain Lehman covered a litany of new studies in an excellent article for The Atlantic today, and they all indicate that the legalization of sports gambling has largely been a disaster.

There are some predictable outcomes, like Northwestern University’s study which found that legal sports gambling depletes household savings by $2 for every $1 gambled, and economists at UCLA found that legalization increases the risk a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent.

But there are even darker consequences that come with a wave of highly addictive betting apps that sports leagues have made inseparable with their product, like how Oregon economists found that legal sports betting leads to about a nine percent increase in intimate-partner violence. Men’s Health conducted a poll of men in 2023 where 58 percent of respondents said sports betting has affected their mental health, 43 percent say it has affected their physical health, and 18 percent say it is “destroying [their] life.”

https://www.splinter.com/the-sports-gambling-crisis-is-america-in-a-nutshell

These sites are geared to people chasing scared money….those trying to make rent….those trying to feed the kids….scared money.

These sites and apps will do whatever it takes to hook you and keep you coming back for one more chance.

Do not be fooled by these sites….there is nothing easy about gambling….

Could it be time to ban on-line betting?

Back in 2018, the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports gambling. “Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake,” writes Charles Fain Lehman in the Atlantic. It may be harmless fun for a lot of people, but far too many can’t control the impulse, and the ubiquitous ads on TV and online aren’t helping. In his essay, Lehman cites studies suggesting that the proliferation of gambling is taking a heavy toll, and usually on families that can least afford it. “Specifically, for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts,” he writes, adding that households with gamblers are more likely to see credit cards maxed out, checking accounts overdrawn, and even bankruptcy.

“More harrowing” is a University of Oregon study estimating that intimate-partner violence rises 9% in states where gambling is legal, he writes. At this point, 38 states allow gambling, with little to show for it given that tax revenue “has been anemic”—less than alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana, writes Lehman. And that’s even as Goldman Sachs says Americans now bet $1 billion a month, up 20-fold since it was legalized. It’s time to ban gambling anew, argues Lehman. “If the states are ‘laboratories of democracy,’ then the results of their experiment with sports gambling are in, and they are uniformly negative,” he writes. “Better to end the study now than prolong the suffering.”

(Read his full essay, which includes more details on the studies cited.)

Any thoughts?

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“lego ergo scribo”