7 ms·

But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than th

But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes. A fraction of the proceeds of losing bets from a fraction of Maryland's citizens contributes almost the same to state services -- EMS, education, road maintenance, etc -- than the total corporate taxes levied on all businesses. Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?

only-one1701 11mo ago
Incredibly damning, yes
- edot 11mo ago
  Damning which way, though? Are gambling taxes too high, or are corporate taxes too low? And since corporate income is surely higher than gambling income, I’m inclined to think that gambling taxes are too high AND corporate taxes are too low, creating this odd fact. Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.
  - musicale 11mo ago
    When you lose (most people, most of the time), you don't have to pay tax on winnings because there aren't any. But gambling itself seems like sort of a regressive tax that preys upon those susceptible to gambling. Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on it.
    - superfrank 11mo ago
      Federally, That's not even true anymore. In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now. If you win $95 on one bet and lose $100 on another, you owe taxes on $5 of that $95.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - iamacyborg 11mo ago
        > In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now. If I understand correctly that’s no longer the case as “sports betting” prediction markets are now becoming a financial product. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-10/do-your-betting-with-your-broker https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-10/do-...
        superfrank 11mo ago
        We're kind of in the middle of that shift, but yeah, prediction markets are futures contracts and handled differently. The main sportsbooks you see advertising on TV like Draft Kings, Fan Duel, etc are still the old sports betting model where you're betting against the house. That's still taxed as sports betting. Kalshi, Polymarket, and some smaller sports focused apps like NoVig and Sporttrade are prediction markets that allow sports predictions and those would allow a full write off. That said, I've heard that most of the major sportsbooks like Draft Kings and Fan Duel are building out their own prediction market platforms, so I think it's only a matter of time until everyone is in that model. Even ignoring the tax implications, it's lower risk and more consistent revenue for the books since they can structure things so they make money on every trade (if they want).
      - BobbyTables2 11mo ago
        That seems wild since exchanging “bet” for “stock trade” results in a very different result…
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    Damning in that pretend I told you my household income was supported by Vinny the bank robber who gives me cash and I launder it for him, and that pays for 6% of my household income. If I told you you can't make bank robbery illegal because I need that money, would you take me seriously at all?
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  There are a lot more people than corporations.
IlikeKitties 11mo ago
We should found the government via heroin and christal meth sales.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  We should ban heroin and crystal meth so nobody does it anymore.
  - IlikeKitties 11mo ago
    No that would give the CIA an undue monopoly on it. That just screams anti-trust!
onionisafruit 11mo ago
This part seems disingenuous. The article is primarily about sports betting, and the author reports that the amount that a much larger category brings in amounts for 6.4% of Maryland’s budget. Without close reading it leaves the reader with the impression that sports betting is responsible for 6.4% of the budget.
- noitpmeder 11mo ago
  I think the author was more trying to say that to ban sports gambling you may need to ban legalized gambling altogether.
mattmaroon 11mo ago
No to both. You probably understand it but it’s not that amazing. States don’t tax corporations much (it’s often fairly easy to move your company to the next state over if taxes are lower) the federal government does. They tax things like sales, homes, gambling and other vices, etc.
- kiba 11mo ago
  Good idea to impose piguouvian taxes, not a good idea to impose sale taxes as that's regressive. Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land. States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - idiotsecant 11mo ago
    Why shouldn't we tax the buildings? It seems like there's lots of real estate out there with relatively moderate land value but astronomical building value.
    - nradov 11mo ago
      Really? Where are those properties?
    - immibis 11mo ago
      You can, but it's a tax on real wealth, which incentivizes a reduction in real wealth. More concretely it incentivizes fewer buildings because people want to pay less tax. If you want fewer buildings then fine. The amount of land is fixed. Taxation on land does not decrease land, but rather incentivizes efficient land use and decreasing land values (which improves efficiency of land use).
      - 11mo ago
TimByte 11mo ago
A state is funding essential public services not through productive economic activity, but by extracting money from people losing bets
- harha 11mo ago
  Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it. If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
  - juliushuijnk 11mo ago
    The goal of the governement is to facilitate conditions where as many people as possible are happy, safe and healthy. The economy of a state is in service of that goal, not the other way around.
  - MSFT_Edging 11mo ago
    > no one is forced to do it This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps. It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction. It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools. The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
    - shadowgovt 11mo ago
      > The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps. Do you have more details on this? I hadn't heard this angle on the story before. I'm mildly surprised this is a concern Google has to have.
kurtis_reed 11mo ago
Not losing bets, all bets
- soVeryTired 11mo ago
  In one sense, winning bets. If you lose, you lose: your money is gone either way. If you win, the fact that the probabilities sum to about 1.05 means you win less than you would have in a fair game. The state just takes a cut of that extra 0.05.
  - jakelazaroff 11mo ago
    The probabilities sum to less than 1, not greater than 1, right?
    - soVeryTired 11mo ago
      If it's a win / lose outcome and both win and lose have a probability of 1/100, I'll make 99x my stake by betting on both win and lose at the same time. If both outcomes have a probability of 0.999 (summing to almost 2), I'll barely make any money if I'm right, and lose my money if I'm wrong. So when probabilities sum to less than 1, it's good for the gambler, and when they sum to more than 1 it's bad for them (and good for the bookkeeper).
127 11mo ago
It's very weird to me how some state entities think cannibalism will cure famine.
HDThoreaun 11mo ago
corporate tax makes no sense for states where you can hire a lawyer to change the home of your corp in a day. States impose income taxes which are harder to dodge and do less to disincentivize investment from corporations. What needs to change is federal capital gains tax, thats the main reason business owners pay such low tax percentages.
idiotsecant 11mo ago
The incredible part is how that's only a tiny fraction of the profits the owners of that gambling operation are extracting from the citizens of maryland. Gambling addiction is a big in the human firmware, and we shouldn't allow private businesses to benefit from it, to the extent stem bwe can reasonably prevent it. Make the state the only source for gambling, make it low-dopamine, and get all the benefit for the state, with a sizable chunk devoted to treating gambling addiction.
0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
I think this is a pretty good approach actually. Give people the freedom to gamble, but discourage it through taxes. It's best to tax things you want to discourage. So it's preferable to tax gambling rather than productive economic activity. Related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
- Saline9515 11mo ago
  Gambling is an addiction without physical substance, it is not clear if taxes reduce gambling.
- jonahbenton 11mo ago
  Taxing the dopamine thing does not discourage the doing of the dopamine thing. Just penalizes the addict and worsens their position.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
    This meta-analysis apparently found that alcohol taxes were effective for reducing alcohol consumption: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735171/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735171/ Why should gambling be different?
    - jonahbenton 11mo ago
      For one, alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified. Second, most recent studies that look at the question classify gambling as more dangerous and addictive. There is much more of a path from gambling to suicide.
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
        >alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified. Not sure what this means. Why can't gambling taxes just be applied at point of sale to create friction?

only-one1701 11mo ago

Incredibly damning, yes

edot 11mo ago
Damning which way, though? Are gambling taxes too high, or are corporate taxes too low? And since corporate income is surely higher than gambling income, I’m inclined to think that gambling taxes are too high AND corporate taxes are too low, creating this odd fact. Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.
- musicale 11mo ago
  When you lose (most people, most of the time), you don't have to pay tax on winnings because there aren't any. But gambling itself seems like sort of a regressive tax that preys upon those susceptible to gambling. Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on it.
  - superfrank 11mo ago
    Federally, That's not even true anymore. In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now. If you win $95 on one bet and lose $100 on another, you owe taxes on $5 of that $95.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - iamacyborg 11mo ago
      > In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now. If I understand correctly that’s no longer the case as “sports betting” prediction markets are now becoming a financial product. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-10/do-your-betting-with-your-broker https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-10/do-...
      - superfrank 11mo ago
        We're kind of in the middle of that shift, but yeah, prediction markets are futures contracts and handled differently. The main sportsbooks you see advertising on TV like Draft Kings, Fan Duel, etc are still the old sports betting model where you're betting against the house. That's still taxed as sports betting. Kalshi, Polymarket, and some smaller sports focused apps like NoVig and Sporttrade are prediction markets that allow sports predictions and those would allow a full write off. That said, I've heard that most of the major sportsbooks like Draft Kings and Fan Duel are building out their own prediction market platforms, so I think it's only a matter of time until everyone is in that model. Even ignoring the tax implications, it's lower risk and more consistent revenue for the books since they can structure things so they make money on every trade (if they want).
    - BobbyTables2 11mo ago
      That seems wild since exchanging “bet” for “stock trade” results in a very different result…
- fragmede 11mo ago
  Damning in that pretend I told you my household income was supported by Vinny the bank robber who gives me cash and I launder it for him, and that pays for 6% of my household income. If I told you you can't make bank robbery illegal because I need that money, would you take me seriously at all?
SoftTalker 11mo ago
There are a lot more people than corporations.

IlikeKitties 11mo ago

We should found the government via heroin and christal meth sales.

mlrtime 11mo ago
We should ban heroin and crystal meth so nobody does it anymore.
- IlikeKitties 11mo ago
  No that would give the CIA an undue monopoly on it. That just screams anti-trust!

onionisafruit 11mo ago

This part seems disingenuous. The article is primarily about sports betting, and the author reports that the amount that a much larger category brings in amounts for 6.4% of Maryland’s budget. Without close reading it leaves the reader with the impression that sports betting is responsible for 6.4% of the budget.

noitpmeder 11mo ago
I think the author was more trying to say that to ban sports gambling you may need to ban legalized gambling altogether.

mattmaroon 11mo ago

No to both. You probably understand it but it’s not that amazing. States don’t tax corporations much (it’s often fairly easy to move your company to the next state over if taxes are lower) the federal government does. They tax things like sales, homes, gambling and other vices, etc.

kiba 11mo ago
Good idea to impose piguouvian taxes, not a good idea to impose sale taxes as that's regressive. Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land. States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- idiotsecant 11mo ago
  Why shouldn't we tax the buildings? It seems like there's lots of real estate out there with relatively moderate land value but astronomical building value.
  - nradov 11mo ago
    Really? Where are those properties?
  - immibis 11mo ago
    You can, but it's a tax on real wealth, which incentivizes a reduction in real wealth. More concretely it incentivizes fewer buildings because people want to pay less tax. If you want fewer buildings then fine. The amount of land is fixed. Taxation on land does not decrease land, but rather incentivizes efficient land use and decreasing land values (which improves efficiency of land use).
    - 11mo ago

TimByte 11mo ago

A state is funding essential public services not through productive economic activity, but by extracting money from people losing bets

harha 11mo ago
Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it. If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
- juliushuijnk 11mo ago
  The goal of the governement is to facilitate conditions where as many people as possible are happy, safe and healthy. The economy of a state is in service of that goal, not the other way around.
- MSFT_Edging 11mo ago
  > no one is forced to do it This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps. It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction. It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools. The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
  - shadowgovt 11mo ago
    > The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps. Do you have more details on this? I hadn't heard this angle on the story before. I'm mildly surprised this is a concern Google has to have.

kurtis_reed 11mo ago

Not losing bets, all bets

soVeryTired 11mo ago
In one sense, winning bets. If you lose, you lose: your money is gone either way. If you win, the fact that the probabilities sum to about 1.05 means you win less than you would have in a fair game. The state just takes a cut of that extra 0.05.
- jakelazaroff 11mo ago
  The probabilities sum to less than 1, not greater than 1, right?
  - soVeryTired 11mo ago
    If it's a win / lose outcome and both win and lose have a probability of 1/100, I'll make 99x my stake by betting on both win and lose at the same time. If both outcomes have a probability of 0.999 (summing to almost 2), I'll barely make any money if I'm right, and lose my money if I'm wrong. So when probabilities sum to less than 1, it's good for the gambler, and when they sum to more than 1 it's bad for them (and good for the bookkeeper).

127 11mo ago

It's very weird to me how some state entities think cannibalism will cure famine.

HDThoreaun 11mo ago

corporate tax makes no sense for states where you can hire a lawyer to change the home of your corp in a day. States impose income taxes which are harder to dodge and do less to disincentivize investment from corporations. What needs to change is federal capital gains tax, thats the main reason business owners pay such low tax percentages.

idiotsecant 11mo ago

The incredible part is how that's only a tiny fraction of the profits the owners of that gambling operation are extracting from the citizens of maryland. Gambling addiction is a big in the human firmware, and we shouldn't allow private businesses to benefit from it, to the extent stem bwe can reasonably prevent it. Make the state the only source for gambling, make it low-dopamine, and get all the benefit for the state, with a sizable chunk devoted to treating gambling addiction.

0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago

I think this is a pretty good approach actually. Give people the freedom to gamble, but discourage it through taxes. It's best to tax things you want to discourage. So it's preferable to tax gambling rather than productive economic activity. Related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

Saline9515 11mo ago
Gambling is an addiction without physical substance, it is not clear if taxes reduce gambling.
jonahbenton 11mo ago
Taxing the dopamine thing does not discourage the doing of the dopamine thing. Just penalizes the addict and worsens their position.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
  This meta-analysis apparently found that alcohol taxes were effective for reducing alcohol consumption: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735171/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735171/ Why should gambling be different?
  - jonahbenton 11mo ago
    For one, alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified. Second, most recent studies that look at the question classify gambling as more dangerous and addictive. There is much more of a path from gambling to suicide.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 11mo ago
      >alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified. Not sure what this means. Why can't gambling taxes just be applied at point of sale to create friction?