Opinion: Why Congress should end legal sports betting

If, after six years, a law was discovered to be encouraging domestic violence while causing people, especially the poor, to lose what little money they could put toward savings, what would be the correct next step?

I hope you would say it would be to repeal this failed law before it did any more harm.

You would be exactly right.

Unfortunately, that’s not so easy when the subject is sports gambling, something that is making more and more money each year for sports leagues, gamblers and local governments. Spend any time watching professional sports on television, and you will be bombarded by the slick and clever ads promising incentives and great returns.

In a piece for The Atlantic this week, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal editor Charles Fain Lehman was clear about what needs to be done.

“If the states are ‘laboratories of democracy,’ then the results of their experiment with sports gambling are in, and they are uniformly negative,” he wrote. “Better to end the study now than prolong the suffering.”

Utah is one of 12 states that have not legalized betting on sporting events. They are the lucky ones, and that list includes Texas and California, two giant holdouts.

“For the other states, undoing the damage may be harder. But it is damage worth undoing,” Lehman said.

This isn’t an opinion based on emotion or moral indignation, although there certainly is much that is immoral about preying on the poor and vulnerable. It’s based on a number of credible studies.

Among the most jarring of these is one out of the University of Oregon that links sports gambling with an increase in domestic violence. Researchers examined crime data from 2011 to 2022 and found that, in places where sports gambling is legalized, a loss by the home NFL team increases intimate partner violence by about 10%.

Further, they found that the violence was worse in states where people could bet via their phones, in locations where higher bets were placed, at times that coordinated with paydays and for teams that were on winning streaks.

In other words, losing money on sports gambling “can amplify the emotional cues from a favorite team’s unexpected loss,” the study said.

Another study by researchers from several universities, including Brigham Young University, looked at how online sports gambling affects household financial management. They found that sports betting increases sharply when it becomes legal, but that this doesn’t replace what households were spending on other gambling ventures. It does, however, significantly reduce household savings.

“These effects concentrate among financially constrained households, who become further constrained as credit card debt increases, available credit decreases, and overdraft frequency rises,” the study said. “Our findings highlight the potential adverse effects of online sports betting on vulnerable households.”

A third study by UCLA and the University of Southern California found a reduction in credit scores in states that legalize sports gambling.

“We find a substantial increase in bankruptcy rates, debt collections, debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies,” it said. “These results are stronger for states that allow sports gambling online compared to states that restrict access to in-person betting, and larger for young men in low-income counties.”

Alarmingly, “Three to four years after the legalization of online sports gambling, we observe that the likelihood of bankruptcy filing increases by as much as 25%-30% …”

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to legalized sports gambling in states that would allow it. Lehman said legal sports gambling went from zero to $10 billion over six years. Goldman Sachs estimates that could eventually rise to $45 billion.

While some are suggesting regulations, Lehman believes those wouldn’t accomplish much. The simplest, most effective solution is to end this experiment completely.

“For little obvious gain, most states have permitted businesses to make billions of dollars off of the most economically precarious among us,” he wrote.

As a Deseret News editorial reported earlier this year, sports gambling companies assign VIP hosts to those who wager the most, encouraging them to spend more. These also tend to be the people with serious gambling problems.

Increases in domestic violence, desperate household financial problems leading to bankruptcy, preying on the poorest and most vulnerable among us — this 6-year-old experiment in online sports gambling is a disaster in progress. This has less to do with the “fun” some people claim to derive from making bets and much to do with the involvement of big business and big marketing that encourages and prods horrible decision-making.

It needs to stop.