The battle between sportsbooks and prediction markets continues.
On Thursday, the American Gaming Association released an email with an attention-grabbing subject line. “ALERT: $1 billion in lost gaming tax revenue.”
The email included a quote from AGA President & CEO Bill Miller on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
“We recently had 41 attorneys general from around the country weighing in saying the CFTC plays an important role in the nation’s economy, but they’re not the regulator of national sportsbooks,” Miller said. “Forty-one attorneys general — that’s from every political stripe that there is in this country. It’s not about the AGA or the gaming industry, it’s about states and tribes that are losing literally $1 billion in state and tribal revenue that would otherwise go to fund important community projects and pay taxes to these states.”
That’s apparently the new talking point in the ongoing (and very high stakes) tug of war between sportsbooks and prediction markets. The states, which make tax dollars from sports betting, are getting nothing from prediction markets.
The AGA statement comes on the heels of President Trump attacking opponents of the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction of prediction markets.
“Under my leadership, we are setting ‘rules of the road’ that are the Gold Standard for the States,” Trump wrote Tuesday, via Declan Harty of Politico. “We cannot have SCUM like Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker setting the rules!”
Gambling is gambling, whatever the packaging. The irony is that, after the federal government prohibited the spread of sports betting for decades (until the Supreme Court opened the floodgates by striking down the 1992 law limiting to the Nevada), the feds have now allowed sports betting to occur under the guise of the trading of futures.
