New Year’s Resolutions 2026 - Time To Quit Gambling ?

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*Gamble responsibly and call 800-GEM-ATRI if you have an addiction problem.

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And it’s always up to you, the gambler, to ultimately be the one who decides how much, how far, and how costly your fun little hobby goes.  A little peep about addiction problems is all you’re going to get as the regulated CYA statement from the sports books.

Ah yes, gematria sports betting.  The hypocritical suggestion that the elites are controlling you including you being fed bread and watching circuses while actively promoting the number one circus.  Like people love telling stories, the more outlandish the better, people love their gambling circuses.  And why not combine the outrageous stories within gambling?

I could go crazy with the speculation on expensive and dubious government activity that could be money laundering schemes.  Things like battleships destined to be big, slow moving target practice.  Gilded ballrooms some are saying may be a lid for a big underground data center.  State controlled cryptocurrency, which is <sarcasm font>totally safe because crypto has never been used as a scam.</sarcasm font>.  But let’s just stick to what we do actually know combined with some inferences about the psychology of gambling and baseless conspiracies.  The psychology is speculation and opinion  enough without delving into the astronomical scammy activity with what’s what and who’s who and why’s why.

Both conspiracy theory based scams and gambling rely on a person who develops into a risk taking personality.  Someone who believes they are never wrong about anything.  Someone who looks in the mirror after a loss and will double down and go harder and riskier the next time to make up for the previous loss.  Instead of taking the L and walking away you never, ever admit publicly that you’re ever wrong even about the tiniest little thing.  And without the tiniest thing being your fault, you’re certainly not going to admit the bigger stuff.  Like being romance scammed out of half your life savings or voting and continually supporting an objectively terrible president.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States

That is not speculative.  If the ranking is going to improve and history changes, a lot of things need to change to change.  So basically it ain’t gonna happen.  Live with it.

The road to addiction is a gradient.  You don’t start off with a billion dollars and jump right into betting $50 million a night not caring much about the outcome from day one.  The addictive personality for the common person takes steps.  First it’s the office March Madness pool.  The occasional lottery ticket.  A Super Bowl party with friendly wagers.  Given enough funding you turn to extra money being invested in equities and bonds.  Riskier things where the return is potentially bigger and you start caring about tax rates, and bubbles with their associated crashes.

In practice, a lot of lottery activity ends being an additional tax on people that don’t understand math.  At face value, the income generated from state run lotteries goes to useful programs.  But with only a handful of people winning a life altering amount and the poorer being the losers that fund the winners - they either need to catch up by working harder.  Or doubling down and blaming anyone but themselves for getting carried away.

Well there’s a new tax on the books for 2026.  A new tax on the common person.  Without cheating on your taxes <sarcasm font>which nobody ever does</sarcasm font> your full gambling losses, all 100%, could be deducted from gambling wins.  Now that’s going to be 90%.

I see two possible main scenarios from this.  And neither looks good for the average paycheck to paycheck American citizen.

Scenario 1 - The additional tax stands

If we refuse to tax the rich to make up deficits, the revenue has got to come from somewhere.  And with everything being gamblified including social issues why not throw a tax in on that?  Especially when the average person is bound to lose anyway, just because of the math.  At -110 odds on a football bet the house edge for the sports book is about 4.5%.  

30 billion per year legally bet on football alone in the U.S.   Divide by two for only half winning.  Adjust for the sports book odds.   Adjust for the new 90% rule.  Average U.S. effective tax rate 14.5% in 2022

$30,000,000,000/2 x 95.5% x .10 x .145 =$207,712.50

Scenario 2 -The tax is eliminated before 2027 sees filing of 2026 returns.

Which means that it’s basically the same.  An additional 200k is not going to make the U.S. government magically fiscally solvent.  Neither will adding up all the other sports betting legally wagered.  The final tally was lower than even I expected, I was thinking it would be.  The cost of the additional bureaucracy, administration and enforcement isn’t even added in. The unreported fun loving circuses gambling income isn’t included.  If the estimated half a trillion for yearly U.S. gambling is used that’s still only x 16.67

So I now I admit I lied and I have to speculate.  With the way people love their gambling.and complaining this looks like a perfect thing for getting lesser minds fired up.  In addition to nonexistent government seizure of guns and nonexistent censorship it’s a total nonissue.  I did an AI overview query and my math is solidly in the same ballpark.  Superficially way off, but the result of $1.1 billion over 10 years?  Pennies.  Just the perfect nonissue for both sides to use as a cultural talking point.  Another political wedge with no real impact on the economy.  Another waste of time instead of addressing the psychological damage and lack of education over multiple generations.  Let’s make an official prediction that I’m claiming this will be mentioned on FOX News multiple times next year.

On an amusing side note, my fake gambling addiction phone number is something I had to test out.  Although it wasn’t a sports betting number, it was a sex line.