I don’t like gambling. I worry about regulation driving it underground, though. I’d rather just see winnings taxed heavily, immediately and without exception or deduction. Invest it in social safety nets and it’s effectively forcing the winners to share their loot with the most vulnerable of the people they’re victimizing.
That doesn’t really address people betting on horrible things and then making them happen.
Also “it will just go underground” is still kind of a win? The average person isn’t going to navigate sketchy underground arrangements, but they’ll find a slick website with good SEO.
Yeah, to a certain extent. The nice things about taxes is that they can be dialed up and down for effect. Complete, tax-free deregulation would obviously be crazy. 100% tax would pretty much be a ban and drive it all underground. Somewhere between 0 and 100, there’s an equilibrium point. Also, conflict of interest should be regulated. I don’t need police betting on how many gunshot victims there will be today.
This seems like a great argument to just never use the under-regulated betting markets.
Unless you’re privy to some insider information you can make bets about. Then you absolutely should.
I don’t like gambling. I worry about regulation driving it underground, though. I’d rather just see winnings taxed heavily, immediately and without exception or deduction. Invest it in social safety nets and it’s effectively forcing the winners to share their loot with the most vulnerable of the people they’re victimizing.
That doesn’t really address people betting on horrible things and then making them happen.
Also “it will just go underground” is still kind of a win? The average person isn’t going to navigate sketchy underground arrangements, but they’ll find a slick website with good SEO.
won’t that still have the same effect of driving it underground though?
Yeah, to a certain extent. The nice things about taxes is that they can be dialed up and down for effect. Complete, tax-free deregulation would obviously be crazy. 100% tax would pretty much be a ban and drive it all underground. Somewhere between 0 and 100, there’s an equilibrium point. Also, conflict of interest should be regulated. I don’t need police betting on how many gunshot victims there will be today.