Because everyone else — or at least our neighbors in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut — was doing it, New York opened the floodgates to sports gambling.
Never mind that our state Constitution bars gambling with the exception of state-run lotteries, pari-mutuel betting on horse races, and at up to seven casinos. First the Legislature and the courts twisted themselves into pretzels to declare that daily fantasy gambling (putting down real money on imaginary rosters) was more about skill than chance, and therefore the prohibition didn’t apply.
Then the same lawmakers who’d disingenuously allowed one form of gambling, claiming it wasn’t a slippery slope to others, happily slid down that very slippery slope to permit full-fledged sports gambling — picking winners, betting against the spread, and every other traditional and newfangled kind of bet-making you can imagine — from the convenience of a smartphone.
This time the pretzel-twisting exercise was rooted in the fiction that people weren’t actually gambling in Brooklyn or the Bronx, where their bodies and hands and smartphones were located, but at one of the four upstate casinos where sportsbooks is legal, because that’s where the computer servers processing the transactions happen to sit. This is not a joke.
Nor are the real-world ramifications. All things being equal, it isn’t a terrible thing that, according to a new analysis by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, the surge in betting put $727 million in the state’s coffers in the last fiscal year.
That money should be put to good use, perhaps even giving state lawmakers the opportunity to cut other taxes and fees — with some substantial share of it being dedicated to helping the problem gambling that the expansion of the practice has fed. The legislation authorizing mobile sports betting requires a paltry 1% of the tax dollars collected from taxes to be set aside for such services.
Still, it’s worth asking, what with $4.8 billion in gambling revenues in the most recent fiscal year, where else that cash could’ve gone: toward spending on other legal goods and services? Into people’s savings accounts? Does anyone care?
Meanwhile, everyone who studies gambling, whether via lotteries or slot machines or roulette wheels or sportsbooks, knows that the enterprises profit because relatively few people — almost always people who really can’t afford it — throw good money after bad, harming themselves and their families.
Which leads us to the second conclusion in DiNapoli’s report: Between 2021 and 2022, problem-gambling-related calls to the state’s Office of Addiction Services and Supports jumped 26%. In the most recent year, state spending on problem gambling stood at $9.6 million, an increase over recent years but a drop in the bucket given the amount of money being thrown away with a tap or a swipe.
All New Yorkers should keep this asymmetry in mind as the state gets ready to open three new casinos downstate (even as DiNapoli found that in-person revenue at the four struggling upstate casinos has declined 45% — so much for being job creators) and as “gaming” cheerleaders now push to allow online casino-style gambling.
They treat the state Constitution like it’s printed on toilet paper as more and more people put down another $20 or $50 or $1,000 in order to win back their losses. They’re bookies, and the book they’re dishonestly remaking is the statute book.
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