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Congressional Democrats, led by Rep. Barney Frank (MA) and encouraged by Senate Majority Leader Harry M Reid (NV), are attempting to sneak through a bill legalizing online gambling. The bill, an amendment to a larger tax relief bill, would make online gambling revenues taxable, which is the ultimate interest of online gambling proponents.

Interestingly, they’re doing this despite repeated national polls that suggest some 67% of the American public oppose the legalization of online gambling. This lame duck move is, one would hope, doomed to failure.

Increased legalized gambling means increased indebtedness, bankruptcies, and addictiveness. In every culture the social cost of increased gambling always outpaces any increase in revenues that may land in public coffers. Consequently, while many solid moral arguments can be marshaled against gambling one of the best arguments against it is practical economics—gambling doesn’t work financially. No one wins but the gambling operation.

Legalization of online gambling has been a perennial goal of the gambling industry since the earliest days of the Internet. But so far, Congress has had enough concerns not to take the plunge.

If this new bill passed it would overturn the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. This legislation bans online gambling and makes it illegal for credit companies to process online gambling funds.

Still, and here’s the irony, since the Internet is the “worldwide” web and not a “national” or “domestic” web, people in the U.S. can and do regularly gamble online—as many as 7 million log on monthly to poker sites alone. They do this by accessing offshore sites. Liberals in Congress don’t like this because all they can see are potential-but-unreachable tax revenues.

Liberals, including Forbes magazine, love to argue four things:

--governments should not restrict gambling because it’s an adult decision,

-more gambling yields more jobs

-more gambling means more tax revenues,

-more gambling is good for economic growth.

 

Yet none of these arguments have been borne out historically. Gambling was, is, and always will be bad economics, bad policy, and bad politics. It’s a time bomb in a pretty package, a snake in the grass that’s waiting to bite. Barney Frank’s bill is a bad bet.

 

 

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010

 

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