Here in California, the airwaves and youtube-waves are saturated with spots prodding you to vote yes/no on Proposition 27. The proposition has to do with allowing online gambling, and you can bet (ha!) that there’s a lot of money involved.
But both sides are doing their best to confuse the issue. The yes people say that this will generate funds that will help the homeless and native American tribes, and the no people say it will hurt native American tribes and that no money will actually go to the homeless. Both sides are backed by either large gambling corporations or native American casinos.
Can anyone reduce this to a couple of sentences of what’s actually going on? I’m inclined to vote no, because enough money is being redirected out of people’s bank accounts and into the maw of gambling interests as it is. Making it easy for anyone over a certain early age to gamble at home is sure way of creating lots of gamble-aholics.
That’s very helpful, thanks. The “Yes on 27” spots appeared months ago, and are very slick and well-produced, which immediately made me suspicious. It takes a buttload of money to create commercial spots that professional-looking. Corporations don’t spend that kind of money just to be nice.
Yes, most of the funding against expansion of gambling initiatives that describe all of the social evils that come with gambling are sponsored by gambling interests who just don’t want more competition.
And pretty much all of the funding in favor of prop 27 is from the corporations that will be siphoning huge amounts of money from Californians to their corporate coffers, while dribbling out a little on the way to supposedly help homelessness. As a cost/benefit measure, it sucks.
I wish people would look at the “success” of the lottery as it was supposed to put so much money into education in the state, and how poorly that works, and at what human cost. At least with the lottery you have to toddle down to your local mart and put your money on the counter. With online betting, all you have to do to bankrupt yourself is to pick up your phone.
Agreed, I’ve already decided to vote NO on both 26 and 27. There is no compelling (or even non-compelling) need for sports betting, no matter who profits by it. The amount of suffering expanding it in Prop27 will cause is huge compared to the amount the big gambling interests are prepared to trickle down to “homelessness.” Re Prop 26, the tribes can go fight over this stuff without involving the rest of CA.
Prop 27 would allow the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel to open up shop in California, as they are already doing in other states, to offer online sports betting. The proposition supposedly would take a portion of the tax revenue generated by this activity and give it to Indian tribes that do not have casinos, as well as homeless programs. This proposition is obviously supported by the two sports betting outfits, and fiercely opposed by the CA Indian gaming cartel.
Prop 26 would allow expanded sports betting only at Indian casinos and a few horse racing tracks. Clearly, this one is meant to counter Prop 27 by keeping all gaming revenue in CA under the purview of the Indian gaming cartel.
IMHO, since online sports betting is already happening legally in other states, there should be no reason it should be prevented from occurring in CA. I have no horse in this race (heh) as I would not do any of this betting anyway, but ISTM fair to allow this so I am voting Yes on 27 and No on 26.
OK, I understand there is a civil liberties argument to be made (i.e., everyone gets to go to hell in his/her own way), but not not exactly convinced it should be as easy as possible, which is the “on-line” aspect of the props. Gambling tends to take the biggest toll on those segments of the population who can least afford it, so maybe not help them down the slide?
In general, I think you want to balance competing interests:
Helping Native tribes
Giving people freedom to do what they want to do
Limiting harm to society (e.g. from people become homeless after losing everything by gambling) that will ultimately cause a greater tax burden for those who used their freedom more wisely.
Pushing back on corruption.
That Native land tends to be sort of out of the way builds in a reasonable balance between #2 and #3. People can do what they want but there’s a limiter on it that keeps it from going crazy too easily. Opening it up to online gambling, to my mind, just screws over the Natives (and Vegas) and harms society.
If they were limiting sports betting at race tracks to just tracks on Native land then I’d be amenable. As it is, I question why tracks are being added that aren’t Native. And even moreso for online gambling, it seems deeply suspicious that the law details that it just be large online companies of a particular size… That feels like legislation designed to reward the people who paid for the legislation, while cutting out the small guys.
Overall, both propositions feel corrupt and neither seems necessary to achieve point #1 above.
I’ll be a no for both unless some point that I didn’t consider comes up.
Probably the more important thing is to go past that to the next steps and see which politicians are backing this and see to it that they lose reelection.
I don’t think this is necessarily true any more. Thru land swaps and greasing the right hands, Indian casinos are encroaching closer into metro areas. They are not necessarily building these facilities on “tribal lands” any more. Here’s one example.
In CA we already have people gambling with the lottery. In the other states where online sports betting is already legal and occurring, I am not seeing reports of the sky falling (maybe it’s too early to tell, to be fair). They probably had the same fight between their Indian casinos and online sports betting - it would be interesting to see any results so far on social issues, or if their Indian gaming industry has really been impacted.
I agree both of these reek of corruption as any gambling measure probably would.
The sky can fall really slow. Julius Caesar set up the Imperial system and, 600 years later, the whole shebang went under because the Imperial system just doesn’t have the guardrails that the Republic did. At no point was there any clear “sky is falling” moment.
In general, we can say that there is some value in gambling in terms of practicing your ability to weigh risk relative to the value. (Though, given the favor to the House, you’ve sort of lost already, the instant that you sit down at the game.) Likewise, there might be some value in learning skills like bluffing and probabilities.
But, overwhelmingly, there’s no upside to gambling. It’s like smoking, there’s some upsides in terms of socializing, etc. but, fundamentally, people would just do something else instead that’s better if they couldn’t smoke. The tax dollars that we spend to help people fight lung cancer would reduce and we would have healthier, happier workers with a longer lifespan. If people didn’t gamble, maybe they’d go to the beach or watch a movie.
If you calculate how much money the gambling industry is making, year on year, the larger that number is, the larger the drain on society. That is the falling sky.
No disagreement at all about the morals around gambling. But that’s not what this thread is about. I am just not seeing why CA is a special snowflake when it comes to this online sports betting thing. I am not a gambler, at all, and if both of them go down in flames it wont affect me, BTW. But I see no reason to limit it to the Indian gaming interests (thereby extending their monopoly), or keep it prohibited in CA.
Just because all our siblings jumped off a bridge seems to me like a poor argument for jumping off the bridge.
The states are a laboratory of ideas. That we go different ways and try different things is sort of the whole idea. If we wanted uniformity, we wouldn’t have outlawed things like having a common, state approved religion, etc.