Our view: Sports-betting ruling feeds states’ gaming addiction

It is time to talk about an important addiction problem — the one in which states hustle, beg and pimp for every dollar of gambling revenue they can get their grubby little hands on.

A couple of decades ago, states insisted that they just wanted some slot machines here and there. Then it was full-fledged casinos. Now, thanks to the dogged efforts of New Jersey and Monday’s 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, they have been given the green light to enter the sports betting racket.

Just because they can doesn’t mean they should. But it’s a good bet that quite a few will. After all, the ruling gives them an opportunity to raise more money for more government without the political heavy lifting of having to increase taxes.

This line of reasoning is naive. State involvement in gambling comes with significant costs. Its proceeds often flow to out-of-state corporations that manage casinos. What does go to government generally comes at the expense of lower tax collections elsewhere in the economy. And the business as a whole has a habit of bringing financial ruin to its most ardent customers, along with the pathologies associated with gambling addiction.

None of this has stopped the push. The arguments for sports betting remain largely delusional. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie championed the cause as a way of rescuing Atlantic City, which has seen steep declines in table gambling since other East Coast cities opened casinos. Good luck with that one. The same places that are eating into Atlantic City’s table business are likely to get into sports betting as well.

Sports betting isn’t immoral, nor does it constitute a huge social problem. At least not yet. Millions of Americans do it all the time. But when states see it as a cash cow, they are targeting hapless individuals who don’t know that the odds are stacked against them, or can’t help themselves even if they do.

Sports betting comes with a second problem: the potential for corruption. Such game fixing is rare in big-time sports for the simple reason that few players or referees would jeopardize their very ample legitimate salaries. The average NFL ref, for instance, makes nearly $200,000 a year for a job that is both part-time and seasonal. Player pay ranges from $480,000 to $30 million.

College sports, however, are another matter. Players aren’t paid, and refs make much less than their counterparts in professional leagues. To some of them, the thought of swinging a game, in a way that doesn’t alter who wins but moves the victory margin to the other side of a point spread, could be hard to resist.

For these reasons, Congress should get into the act of regulating sports betting, something that the Supreme Court explicitly said it could do.

Without a national standard, states are likely to enter into a race to the bottom by offering lax oversight to attract more sports betting. The states can’t help themselves. They’re addicted to the money.

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