Learn about the impacts Predatory Gambling is having across American society. Watch the excellent sessions below, recorded at our 2025 National Conference.
What America Doesn’t Know About Online Gambling
Online gambling has metastasized across the United States, causing life-changing addiction and financial harm for many Americans. Yet despite its massive impacts, public understanding remains limited—and often clouded by myths, outdated perceptions, and deceptive and aggressive marketing. Panelists will unpack what the public and policymakers still don’t fully grasp and what should be done to address this major problem.
Panelists: Michael Clauw, Rob Minnick, Isaac Rose-Berman, Prof. Wayne Taylor, Matt Zarb-Cousin & Moderator: Dr. Kavita Fischer
Debunking the Claim That Gambling Revenue Is a State Budget Boost
The primary rationale behind why state governments partner with gambling operators to continually push commercialized gambling into the daily lives of nearly every citizen is the claim that it’s a good long-term source of government revenues. Are these claims true? Learn and discuss the real fiscal impact of commercialized gambling on state budgets with the person many regard as the preeminent expert in the nation on the topic.
Stop the Harm: Hear from Those Who Experienced Firsthand the Predatory Tactics of the Gambling Industry
Gambling is as addictive as cocaine, opioids and heroin. It carries the highest suicide rate of any addiction, and the top demographic calling gambling addiction helplines is young adults and teens. Yet the gambling industry continues to get a free pass to harm a growing number of Americans. Victims who have experienced first-hand the predatory practices of the industry and those who advocate on their behalf will share their stories in this session and what it’s like to stand up to a multi-billion dollar industry.
Panelists: Ronda Hatefi, Kitty Martz, Gary Schneider, David Tarbert & Moderator: Rob Minnick
Debate: Is Commercialized Gambling Regulation the Endgame?
One side in this friendly and spirited debate believes our movement should set the vision that state-sponsored gambling should not be the norm and the endgame is to take government out of the gambling business because it’s been an epic public policy failure by every measure, dispelling the notion that we can “regulate our way out of the problem.” The other side believes widespread commercialized gambling in America is here to stay as a part of daily life and it is realistic to expect that limitations and regulations can be put around it to eliminate the harms it leaves in its wake. There are varying degrees of nuance between those two positions. This will be an invaluable debate among peers as we sharpen one another for the fights ahead.
Panelists: Steven Alm, Les Bernal, Michael Clauw, Brianne Doura-Schawohl, Marcus Oshiro, Isaac Rose-Berman, Prof. Wayne Taylor, Matt Zarb-Cousin
What Are ‘Prediction Markets’ and How Are They Getting Away With Operating Like an Online Gambling Platform?
This session is a must-know primer on the exploding issue of prediction futures markets like Kalshi and Polymarket which are dangerously threatening the autonomy of all states to make decisions on commercialized gambling.
Panelists: Dr. Noah Goodall, Prof. John Kindt, Rob Minnick, Isaac Rose-Berman & Moderator: Russ Coleman
Beyond the Sportsbook: Regional Casinos & State Lotteries Are Still Harming Americans
Commercialized sports gambling has largely dominated the national headlines in the last few years, but regional casinos and state lotteries are more aggressive than ever. This session will discuss the major negative impacts that regional casinos and state lotteries are causing citizens and their communities.
Panelists: Dr. Noah Goodall, Rob Kohler, Dr. Jonathan Krutz
Lessons for America: Gambling Reform Across the Globe
Other countries are further down the road than the U.S. when it comes to the rapid spread of predatory gambling and attempts to rein it in. Our allies from across the pond will share lessons learned and implications for the United States.
Panelists: Matt Zarb-Cousin, Derek Webb & Moderator: Dr. Jonathan Krutz
Harnessing The Power of Digital Media to Shift the Narrative – Even When Facing the Gambling Industry Giant
How to make your audience see, hear, feel and be changed by your message—even when your messaging opponents are louder and have way more money than you.
Panelists: Michael Clauw, Rob Minnick, Matt Zarb-Cousin & Moderator: Autumn Stroup
Below is the brief video testimony of Les Bernal, National Director of Stop Predatory Gambling, before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism’s hearing “Post-PASPA: An Examination of Sports Betting in America” on September 27, 2018. Bernal’s written testimony can be found below the video.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on the topic of sports betting in America.
My name is Les Bernal and I am the National Director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a national government reform network of individuals and organizations from across the United States. I’m also a parent and a former high school and college men’s basketball coach.
Stop Predatory Gambling believes in improving the lives of the American people with compassion and fairness.
We believe everyone should have a fair opportunity to get ahead.
We believe every person’s life has worth and no one is expendable.
We believe state government should not depend on commercialized gambling to fund its activities.
Because of what we stand for, we are one of the most politically diverse organizations in the United States, one in which conservatives and progressives work side-by-side to improve the common good. This reality was evidenced by the amicus brief that Stop Predatory Gambling filed in the Murphy case, co-signed by more than thirty different organizations, including some of the most influential liberal and conservative groups in America.[i]
An Urgent National Problem that Only Federal Action Will Address
Leaders of all political stripes agree that improving opportunity and mobility out of poverty is one of the defining challenges of our time. Around 50 percent of the US population has zero or negative net wealth, meaning their debts equal or exceed their assets.[ii] Yet one major contributing factor to this serious situation has been ignored for too long: Americans are expected to lose $118 billion of their personal wealth to government-sanctioned gambling in 2018.[iii]Many of these citizens suffered life-changing financial losses.
If Congress doesn’t take action to address this problem, then the American people are going to lose more than $1 trillion of wealth to government-sanctioned gambling over the next eight years. Sports betting will make these financial losses even worse.
The reason? The almost sole focus of state-sanctioned gambling has been to maximize government revenues, not to promote and protect the public interest.And nothing suggests sports betting will be any different unless there is strong federal action.
Why Gambling is Different Than Every Other Business or Commodity
There is a faulty assumption surrounding commercialized gambling and it has led to very bad outcomes for the American people. It’s the false perception that gambling is just like any other business. What separates commercialized gambling from every other business, including those involving vices like alcohol and tobacco, is gambling is a big con game. Citizens are conned into thinking they can win money on games that are designed, in the end, to get them fleeced. If you pay for a hamburger, a book, or a glass of wine, that’s what you receive in return. In commercialized gambling, what you receive is the lure you are going to win money. But the game is mathematically stacked against you and inevitably, you’ll lose in the end, especially if you keep gambling.
If you do win some money back, in most cases it comes at the expense and misery of many other people. And an ESPN story recently highlighted that in commercial sports betting, if you try to win, the bookmakers don’t let you place bets anymore.[iv] Bookmakers are severely restricting or closing accounts for the very fact that these people are winning!
“Let People Gamble If They Want,” You May Say
We already have the freedom to gamble. Up to now, many Americans participate in office pools for the Super Bowl, NCAA March Madness brackets, or make casual wagers on the golf course with their friends. These informal events are examples of social gambling.
Social gambling stands in contrast to state-sanctioned gambling, or predatory gambling, that—by design—is much less constrained. It happens when state governments partner with powerful corporate gambling interests to operate and market for-profit gambling to citizens and their communities.
In state-sanctioned gambling, there is a “house” skimming a large profit. It’s exempt from truth-in-advertising laws, giving states and gambling corporations wide latitude to market gambling, grossly exaggerate chances of winning and aggressively lure citizens to gamble away bigger sums of their cash. People often borrow money to participate. It goes on all day, every day of the week, year round. And it requires the majority of Americans who rarely gamble to subsidize the scheme with their own cash, footing the bill for the steep social costs and state budget problems it leaves behind.
One can be a libertarian on this, while at the same time, believing that we cross an unacceptable ethical line when we go from allowing individuals to gamble to allowing our government to set up a massive marketing and distribution scheme urging people to do so. Making a bet with a friend, that’s one thing, but if you do it against a sportsbook, you’re going to lose money all the time.
Illegal Gambling Tends to Increase When States Legalize Gambling
The primary source of information for the size and scope of illegal sports gambling in the U.S. has been the American Gaming Association, the national lobbying organization for gambling operators who have a vested financial interest in seeing commercialized gambling metastasize.
When gambling operators call for “regulation,” what they really mean is government granting monopolies and awarding regulatory advantages to favored firms.
Presently in the U.S., no illegal gambling operator is putting liens on the homes of citizens to collect gambling losses, like legal operators do. No illegal operator sends free gambling wagers by direct mail to your house to lure you back to the local casino, like legal operators do. No illegal operator is pushing $50 lottery scratch tickets, seven days a week, in economically-depressed communities, like state lotteries do. No illegal operators are running gambling ads during live broadcasts of sporting events with such intensity that one out of every five ads is to place a bet, which is what some of the legal sports gambling operators maneuvering here in the U.S. do in places like the United Kingdom.[v] No illegal operator is sponsoring pro sports teams, which involves team uniforms emblazoned with the names of gambling companies on them; stadium and arena surfaces where continuous gambling ads surround the game itself; and pre-match and post-match interviews, like the legal operators do in the U.K.[vi]
If the illegal sports gambling operators supposedly cannot be controlled right now, as the big commercial gambling operators claim, then how can you control and regulate the gambling operators you license? If you can’t shut down the illegal sports gambling operators now, how would you possibly shut down licensed operators who don’t follow the rules?
There are a number of other reasons why illegal gambling tends to increase when states sanction gambling. These include:
Untaxed illegal operators can offer better odds and tax avoidance that legal operations cannot.
Once gamblers start betting legally, they become less averse to gambling in unlicensed venues and websites.
Law enforcement in gambling states view illegal gambling as a state revenue issue rather than a criminal activity, making enforcement less of a priority.
Commercialized Sports Betting Severely Harms Kids and Will Radically Change the Way That Kids Consume Sports
Studies show that children in those countries with legal sports gambling are repeatedly exposed to harmful messages and advertisements about sports gambling.[vii] The frequency of sports gambling ads normalizes gambling for kids.[viii] These kids come to see gambling as central to playing and watching sports.[ix] Rather than talking about their favorite team, they talk about the odds of their team winning.
The younger children start gambling, the more likely it is they will become habitual and problem gamblers, regardless whether they are from an urban or a suburban community.[x]
Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health have published nearly a dozen papers on Baltimore youths and gambling.[xi] They found a strong link between gambling and other problems among the city’s youth. Other studies in the Johns Hopkins’ series found that gambling often leads to depression, crime, homelessness and joblessness in young adulthood.[xii]
When you talk about sports gambling in 2018, it means gambling on almost any kind of contest you can imagine:
In-play betting;
Betting on video games or eSports;
Betting on pop culture TV programs like The Bachelor and The Oscars;
And much of it is happening online in the form of online gambling.
Can you imagine allowing young people to gamble on video games? That’s where gambling operators, and their partners in state government, are leading this country unless Congress acts.
For the Majority of Americans Who Don’t Gamble, You Pay Even If You Don’t Play
Gambling lobbyists and some public officials continue to tout government-sanctioned gambling as a way to raise tax revenue. But history has shown repeatedly that this argument is either overstated or wrong. A 2016 national report by The Rockefeller Institute at SUNY-Albany found that while states creating new revenue streams from gambling may see momentary bumps in tax income, “the revenue returns deteriorate—and often quickly.”[xiii]
Beyond its obvious status as a budgetary shell game, government-sanctioned gambling incurs major social costs that end up being footed by all taxpayers. In addition to targeting and exploiting the financially desperate and cultivating addiction,[xiv][xv] government-sanctioned gambling leads to increases in rates of personal bankruptcy and provides new avenues for crime and money laundering.[xvi][xvii] Gambling operators don’t pay for the harms they cause families, businesses, and communities. Taxpayers do.
All the citizens who don’t gamble also pay another way. Government-sanctioned gambling lowers our national standard of living because it’s a sterile transfer of money from millions of ordinary people’s pockets into a small number of other people’s pockets, producing nothing new and nothing of lasting value. Its economic impact is similar to throwing your money on the street so someone else can pick it up – it redistributes wealth without creating it. Because this nonproductive activity nevertheless uses up time and resources, we experience a reduced national standard of living, a consequence that impacts all of us.
CONCLUSION
State governments are often called laboratories of democracy. But over the last 30 years, the record is clear: when it comes to gambling policy, states are laboratories of fraud, exploitation and budgetary shell games.
Without Congressional action, the American people are on a collision course to lose more than $1 trillion of wealth to government-sanctioned gambling over the next eight years. Widespread commercialized sports betting will make these financial losses even worse.
Public officials and opinion leaders who profess a desire to improve opportunity and alleviate poverty often lament how few levers they have to pull. Priority one needs to be to stop turning millions of people who are small earners, who could be small savers, into habitual bettors.
[ii] The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Vol. 1, May 2016, Issue 2, Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data, Pg. 554. http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2016QJE.pdf
[vii] Hannah Pitt et al., “It’s just everywhere!” Children and parents discuss the marketing of sports wagering in Australia,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 480, 485 (Oct. 2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27524502
This Washington Post story looks at the intended use for lottery revenues in each state. On average, lotteries accounted for 2 percent of overall state revenues, according to an analysis of Census data from researchers at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a State University of New York policy think tank.
Lower-income Americans overwhelmingly engage in other forms of state-sanctioned gambling, studies show. Increased levels of lottery play have been linked with certain sections of the U.S. population — men, African-Americans, Native Americans, and those who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, according to one 2011 study of over 5,000 people published in the Journal of Gambling Studies.
As California Lottery ticket sales have skyrocketed, California schools aren’t seeing much of a return on that investment. A KPCC/LAist investigation found contributions to education by the lottery are essentially unchanged from 12 years ago, even though revenues are up by billions.
“It’s toilet paper money,” said Mona Field, who writes a textbook on government and served on the Los Angeles Community College District board for four terms. “It really has always been a tiny, tiny percent of our education funding in California.”
When it comes to its casino expansion initiative as a vehicle for economic prosperity, New York seems very eager to keep hitting. But it’s a gamble that, at the moment, doesn’t appear to be paying off.
The three casinos are estimated to produce a combined $220 million less in revenue this year than they promised to state regulators when they won their bids to build the casinos three years ago. Del Lago has generated $113 million in gambling revenue in its first nine months, far short of its $263 million projection.
Despite their role in increasing economic inequality, lotteries remain remarkably popular in the United States, as millions of players believe in the distant chance that a lucky gamble will change their life. In 2014, annual sales reached over $70 billion, and Americans spent more on lottery tickets per year than they spent on books, sports tickets, music, video games and movie tickets combined.
The United States has a lottery problem, but it runs much deeper than players duped by a “stupid tax.” Public officials need to address the nation’s lottery addiction. When they do so, however, they need to consider not only the root causes of lotteries’ popularity — for example, declining access to social mobility and the concentration of lottery outlets in poor neighborhoods — but also the beliefs about taxes and state revenue that ushered in lottery legislation in the first place.
This was to be a year of celebration for New York’s booming gambling industry, with gleaming new casinos opening, rapturous bettors flocking in and a win-win for the state, and a torrent of new taxes pouring into government coffers at no cost to anyone but the bettors themselves.
But like casinos — where glitter often hides the grime — the reality has been far less glamorous, with underwhelming returns, evidence of industry cannibalization and a new, sharp-edged conflict between the state and a major tribal gambling operation.
An academic paper written by PhD candidates at the University of Illinois took a closer look at the expansion of video gambling machines in the state and their relation to crime.
According to the paper, “increased access to video gambling leads to a statistically significant rise in violent and property crimes in Chicago.”
More from the paper:
On average, being near at least one video gambling establishment is associated with a 7.5% and 6.7% increase in violent and property crime. These estimates control for potential confounders, including access to riverboat casinos, community area specific trends, and demographic controls. Reassuringly, these effects are strongest in the block groups closest to video gambling establishments. The effects decrease as gambling access declines, becoming zero after moving three census block groups away, and remaining at zero thereafter.
This essay ran in The Public Interest in 1996. It remains one of the most persuasive about the ways in which state-sanctioned gambling severely damages American society and worsens people’s lives.
