How Exploiting Pathetic Male Addicts Took Over the Economy
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According to the American Psychiatric Association, nearly 40 percent of men and 20 percent of women gamble online daily. Two percent of those bettors gamble more than ten hours a day. Sports bettors have wagered over $600 billion since 2018. The National Council on Problem Gambling notes that about 2.5 million Americans “meet the criteria” for a severe problem; five to eight million more have mild to moderate issues.
As the country’s affordability crisis deepens, individuals and entire families can slide into cycles of addiction and debt. Bank of America warned in a November research note that gambling is creating “emerging credit risks” across the economy; an April paper from UCLA and USC found that credit scores in states that have adopted online sports betting are down, and bankruptcy rates and auto loan delinquencies are up. Eight U.S. studies found that 1 in 5 problem gamblers have tried to commit suicide, the highest rate for any addiction disorder.
Most bettors are men. They’ve gotten younger and younger as sports betting companies gamified gambling. Pokémon, the trading card and video game mega-franchise, co-opted slot machine and casino imagery in the 1990s, and technology companies latched on, eager to bring in young gamblers to replace the old heads. Public schools see problems with boys, and sports betting stokes some school officials’ fears of it becoming as ubiquitous as cellphones and as poisonous as social media.
State politicians have largely looked the other way: The attractive tax revenues from the relative handful of bettors reduce the need for broad-based taxes. Conveniently ignored are the profound contradictions between safeguarding the public welfare and the mental health and financial problems gambling can exacerbate. “It’s a system of taxation by exploitation, and it’s been an epic public-policy failure,” says Les Bernal, the national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a national advocacy group.
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In most states, excise tax revenues are small, comprising less than 10 percent of a state’s budget, and in many cases 5 percent or less. Sin taxes on gambling, alcohol, and marijuana are especially volatile and can often level off or plummet (as in the case of cigarettes) depending on the market or changes in social attitudes. In the sports betting sector, companies could pass their costs on to bettors in the form of higher odds. Such a shift could drive bettors into grayer areas. “If you can get better odds by betting with the bookie down the street, then maybe you’ll do that instead of participating in the legal market,” says Adam Hoffer, director of excise tax policy studies at the Tax Foundation, a Washington think tank.
But the “legal” market isn’t exactly generous to its customers either. DraftKings uses AI to learn which micro bets will entice users. Apps carpet-bomb promotions for “free” money that cannot be redeemed unless bet multiple times. “There’s been plenty of stories over the last couple of years on the people who do sign up [to bet] and are on losing streaks and get emails from DraftKings bots basically saying, ‘Here’s another $1,000!’” Stevens says. “That kind of business model that essentially poisons you if you are so addicted; it is something to me that the state should have no interest in from a public-health perspective.”
Vermont’s sports betting revenue goes into its general fund, a Responsible Gaming Special Fund, and industry regulation. In 2024, Vermont bettors did well enough that tax revenues were under projections at $6 million, still a healthy sum for a small state.
Stevens believes that young men, the targets of all this psychological warfare, think they can handle betting constantly on their phones, but they ignore the ever-present dangers. It’s the same for state officials, who dismiss the negative impact of gambling because it brings in money they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. Can Vermont decouple itself from these revenues?
“What it really comes down to is we would rather tax, whether it’s by choice or not, with lotteries and gambling,” says Stevens. “That’s the way our culture is, and I don’t see that changing.”
So basically, the entire nation is now dependent on mostly young men ruining their lives through addiction. Might as well just promote smoking, at least it looked cool in black and white films.