You can count on it like clockwork: The government is always wrong. Proponents of legal sports gambling have long argued that it would be a boon to the economy, but a new report shows that at least in New Jersey, the Vegas-ization of America isn’t all jackpots.
Not All Winners In New Jersey Gambling
Breitbart noticed a Guardian piece that delivered the bad news to pro-bettors.
The common refrain is that the increased revenue from gambling will be used for typically liberal priorities and programs, like more money for government schools. Such an argument seems to be effective, if not the reality.
Take it with a grain of salt because the report comes from a partisan group opposed to gambling, but …
… the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, found that $2.4bn spent by people gambling online in New Jersey in 2022 “decreased New Jersey’s economic activity by about $180m”.
That doesn’t get into what that $2.4 billion could have otherwise been spent on, but it does essentially argue that such spending is a drag and an overall loss to the economy, not a boom.
Another outfit researching the effects, NERA Economic Consulting, reports that alternative paths for that spending:
“… significantly more would have been paid out in wages, which employees would have then spent on other parts of the economy.”
Secondary Effects
Economic activity doesn’t take place in a vacuum – there are other second and third-order effects that are often ignored or downplayed when dealing with this topic.
As Bounding’s Remso Martinez wrote earlier this week, young men are flocking to gambling and gambling addiction like a housewife who just saw the Powerball is at $1 billion.
Essentially, ease of access and the gamification of gambling has the possibility of turning millions of young men into the hard-luck crowd, left only to their vices on the outskirts of Reno.
As our earlier piece pointed out:
Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University School of Social Work states that, “You can be gambling away your house on your mobile phone sitting at the dinner table, and not a single person will know until the devastation of your whole family is complete.”
Pro-gambling forces may be right in terms of the ethics of gambling; it’s your money. But an honest and fair accounting of the side effects is also necessary for lawmakers and voters to make the right decisions for their state.