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Craig's Stimulus Plan: Legalize Online Gambling
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It's pretty amazing that Congress and the President are giving billions to hope and pray it saves or creates jobs. We have bailed out industries that are failing and industries that have made poor business decisions. Congress will let Wall Street gamble all of our 401k's and retirement accounts down the toilet but won't let the normal Joe hard-working citizen bet a couple dollars on their favorite sports teams.
The United States could lose nearly $52 billion in revenue over the next decade if Congress does not lift the three-year-old ban on Internet gambling and tax online gambling instead, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers's study.
But PricewaterhouseCoopers' latest online gambling report on how much the United States could lose from not taxing online gambling is about 22 percent higher than in 2007 due to the fact that U.S. online gambling has grown since the prohibition of online gambling.
Why are lawmakers so worried about the ills of online gambling when almost every state has some form of gambling, either lottery, casino, or horse tracks? Congress needs to quit worrying about making decisions for us on what forms of gambling are legal.
The federal deficit has risen trillions over the last couple years. Why doesn't someone start to create tax dollars instead of spending them? Legalizing online gambling will create tax revenue and also create jobs for programmers, customer service personnel, accountants, etc. These new workers will then have more disposable income to spend in other sectors and help create jobs in other industries.
Not only will jobs and disposable income increase, but think also of the tax dollars from profits of the online gambling industry. Charge 20 percent to the internet gambling companies operating with U.S. citizens; that would safely be a $100 billion industry that will make in the neighborhood of $20 billion profit. That would be $4 billion in tax revenue just from the companies.
That does not even take into consideration the payroll taxes from the companies' new employees or the tax dollars from gambling profits of their customers.
Now that is a stimulus package that the average citizen would stand behind. It has all three aspects of a good stimulus package: It's basically free to start up, creates tax dollars, and creates jobs for Americans.
Get with it, Obama and Congress—everywhere else in the world allows online gambling, and we are missing out. Quit hiding behind the morals argument and realize that gambling is all around us. Take advantage of an industry that could truly help us jump start the AMERICAN ECONOMY!
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And it's bullshit. All the supposed problems presented by internet gambling (fly-by-night online casinos, cheating, tax evasion) would be completely solved by allowing these companies to be based in the US, then regulated by gaming commissions.
You wouldn't want to tax the casinos more than any other company, because then the companies wouldn't want to be based in the US.
The $20B you cite is very much on the high side, since size of an industry doesn't have much to do with the profits of an industry's companies, and that's what gets taxed. But there would be some tax money, and a few jobs generated.