States turn to Internet gaming for new revenue

opinions

August 15, 2011 - 12:00 AM

Washington, D.C. officials want the home of the nation’s capital to become an Internet gambling hub.
If they are successful in overcoming the legal barriers, every computer would become a casino, a poker parlor and a bingo center. Buddy Roogow, executive director of the D. C. Lottery, the organization formed to promote the plan, believes the district could take in as much as $9 million a year. “That’s real money in D.C.,” he told an Associated Press reporter.
Roogow is not alone. Similar campaigns are under way in other cash-strapped states, such as Maryland and California.
Many states are already taking in cash from lotteries, parimutuel gambling on racing and taxes on casinos. Internet gambling is all they have left to tap.
Only the federal government is in the way. Federal law currently prohibits Internet gambling, according to most readings of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which Congress passed in 2006, with off-shore operators as its target.
But as is so often the case, some legal experts believe the law gives states the right to run Internet gambling operations, while others are just as certain that it does not.
The legality of making high-dollar gambling ubiquitous should be beside the point. The first question to ask is whether it is a good idea “to open a lottery retailer in every home, office and dorm room in America,” as Les Bernal, executive director of the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation puts it.
The answer surely is no, it’s a lousy idea.

GAMBLING TO raise money for government is justified with the argument that the money is spent voluntarily and is looked upon by those who spend it as entertainment. They also say that the industry can be regulated to prevent addicts from playing.
Moreover, it would be much easier to pass legislation authorizing Internet gambling than it would be to allow the tax cuts on the rich expire as they are supposed to do next year or to repeal some of the more egregious subsidies granted to the oil companies which are rolling in wealth or repeal other tax breaks which can no longer be justified.
To summarize, the sleazy way is the easy way.
The money it takes to run government at all levels should be raised in the fairest way that Congress, the states and local governments can devise. Historically, the definition of fair taxation has been to take the most from those who have the most and the least from those at the bottom of the ladder.
Taxing gambling — any kind of gambling — doesn’t meet that definition. It shouldn’t be necessary to say more.

 

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

Related
February 11, 2021
June 5, 2020
July 20, 2018
May 14, 2018