by Brandon Reiter
In March 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court voted to strike down the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PAPSA), ending the federal ban on sports betting in every state except Nevada. This allowed states to decide if they wanted to legalize sports gambling. Today, 38 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico have done so.
For many years, the major sports leagues’ concerns with gambling were primarily to do with the integrity of their product. The leagues felt that allowing gambling could compromise their sports and pose as a destructive force. Eventually, they began to realize that gambling could actually increases interest and revenue tremendously. In the 2010’s, the league’s began to change their tune by investing in casinos and gambling companies, putting teams in Las Vegas, and joining the push to end PAPSA. The league’s and the government realized legal gambling would create jobs, generate tax revenue, and lower the rate of crime involved with illegal gambling.
Now that we are five years since legalization, we can look at how sports betting impacted the U.S. economy. According to the American Gaming Association, The legal U.S. sports betting market generated$7.56 billion of total revenue in 2022, an increase of about 75% from 2021. Americans legally wagered $93.73 billion, compared to $57.53 billion in 2021. New York accounted for $1.37 billion of the national revenue total, as their launch of online sports betting in January 2022 saw it become the largest legal sports betting market in the country by a long shot. New York imposes a 51% state tax on gross gaming revenue. Tax rates vary across states, but in 2022, 27 of those states combined for $1.5 billion tax revenue from sports betting.
It’s not just the tax revenue that has positively impacted the economy. According to a report published this May by IBISworld, there are more than 24,000 businesses employing over 200,000 workers related to sports betting. The leagues are also making more money, not just from partnering with the sportsbooks and casinos, but also selling their data to technology companies that work with the casinos, as well as increased viewership and interest. Specifically, the NFL has increased viewership every year since 2018.
Another interesting financial aspect about gambling is that even when the Casinos are on a losing end of a wager, tax is still being paid. If you, as a gambler, made more than $600 for the year, you have to pay income tax on that. What this means is that nearly every wager placed, whether won or lost by the casinos, generates tax revenue.
It’s no secret that gambling has supplied a boost to the U.S. economy in the form of tax revenue, job creation, and consumer spending. However, everything comes with a cost. Gambling addiction has been on the rise each year since legalization. The lack of regulation in the beginning allowed for extremally predatory and misleading ads that lured in people to start betting with promotions described as “risk-free bets” when in fact, you had to risk money in order to get credits that were in the form of bonus bets. While there is very limited data on this subject because it is all so new and hard to quantify, there are probably plenty of people that would never have placed a sports bet prior to 2018 who now have an addiction. It will be interesting to see how regulation evolves over the years and whether or not the monetary gains for the economy are worth the social costs.
