Diamond Member Pelican Press 0 Posted March 24 Diamond Member Share Posted March 24 Why March Madness is a special time of year for state budgets Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain March Madness—the time when the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up basketball teams challenge each other—is a made-for-television spectacle This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . While This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , one of the tournament’s biggest changes happened in 2018, when the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . Since then, legal sports ******** has skyrocketed. Americans This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up in 2023, according to the ********* Gaming Association, which promotes gambling. In 2024, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Americans will place This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up on March Madness alone. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up a This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up professor fascinated by March Madness and sports ********. Studying sports ******** has shown me how valuable it is for states short on cash. Unfortunately, it also has significant drawbacks, especially for This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and their families. Why lawmakers love sports ******** As of March 2024, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up some form of sports gambling, and six more are debating the issue. State lawmakers are interested in sports gambling because they have a fiscal problem. State spending over time has This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up after This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . While state spending is increasing, state revenue from so-called “sin taxes” has flatlined after adjusting for inflation. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , reducing This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . Even This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up after growing strongly for decades. Increased spending combined with a reluctance to raise taxes has led to a push to find new sources of revenue. That This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up option to politicians. The statehouse always wins This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up on sports each year. More than 90% of the money bet goes to paying out winning gamblers. Gambling operators keep the rest, which they share with the states. The percentage kept, called the hold rate, has been This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , with 2023’s This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up of the money bet. State governments now collect This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , or about $2 billion a year, from sports gambling. That’s roughly one-fifth of that 9.1%. If gamblers bet around $3 billion on March Madness, then states will pocket over $50 million dollars in extra revenue just from a three-week basketball tournament. The ugly side of sports ******** Gambling is wonderful for state revenues and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . However, it has This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up : While many people enjoy gambling, millions of Americans have a gambling problem. Studies suggest This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up of adults fall into this category. In Massachusetts, where I teach, a 2018 survey found that about 2% of adults were already problem gamblers, and This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . Meanwhile, the number of calls to the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up lasting more than a minute This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . While this doesn’t mean that problem gambling has become more common—among other issues, correlation isn’t causation—the increase very closely matches the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up across the U.S. Two possible policy solutions ******** on sports was ******** before 2018. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up to either bet with a bookie or an offshore site. ******** with a bookie before 2018 was a relatively slow process. Gamblers typically needed to pay for their bets upfront with cash and ran the risk their bookie would be arrested or shut down. Today, in-play or live ******** is legal and almost instantaneous. Bettors sitting on their couches at home can make multiple types of bets, such as which This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up in a basketball game. In business terms, sports gambling went from extreme friction to a completely This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . To reduce the harms of sports ********, I propose two ways to reinject friction into the system. The first is to prevent This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . While not every state and bank allows credit cards to fund a sports ******** account, many do. Those credit cards that allow it often treat gambling payments as a This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . The This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up in 2020, noting that people who used credit cards to gamble were This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up online bets made with credit cards. A few U.S. states, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , have also instituted these sorts of bans, but most have not. The second idea, which I prefer, is to This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up of using cash to bet. The idea is simple. Anyone with an online gambling account would need to prefund their account with cash. Winners would never have to stop gambling. Losers, however, would be forced to temporarily stop ******** when their account runs out of money. Needing to take a break to go to a bank or simply pull money out of your wallet and hand it to someone would give people a chance to think about what they’re doing instead of being stuck in the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . In theory, people could ******** cash into their accounts at any of the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . To implement this idea, however, the federal government would need to change a law. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up , it has imposed a This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up who accepts bets for profit. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . This tax doesn’t raise much revenue already, This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up to it. It also reduces employment, as well as gambling companies’ interest in allowing in-person prefunding of accounts. If you’re watching March Madness and ******** on the tournament, I hope you win. But even if you don’t, at least your state government will. Provided by The Conversation This article is republished from This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up under a Creative Commons license. Read the This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up . Citation: Why March Madness is a special time of year for state budgets (2024, March 24) retrieved 24 March 2024 from This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Science, Physics News, Science news, Technology News, Physics, Materials, Nanotech, Technology, Science #March #Madness #special #time #year #state #budgets This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Link to comment https://hopzone.eu/forums/topic/6844-why-march-madness-is-a-special-time-of-year-for-state-budgets/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
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