NC Newsline editor Rob Schofield says a state legislative proposal to add gambling losses to the list of eligible income tax deductions is bad idea for North Carolina. Photo: Getty Images
As anyone who watches a pro or college sporting event these days knows all too well, America’s massive and growing corporate gambling industry is spreading like an invasive and herbicide-resistant weed.
Slickly packaged gambling ads from businesses like DraftKings and FanDuel — corporations that once masqueraded as “fantasy sports” purveyors, but that no longer pretend to be anything other than bookmakers — are ubiquitous, and compete with come-ons from casino behemoths like Caesars and Bet MGM. Famous and beloved athletes like football’s Mannings have become gambling pitchmen.
Play-by-play announcers and commentators who once spent pre-game shows and between-period breaks focused on discussions of player performance and strategy are now obliged to devote time to reviewing up-to-the-minute betting odds.
Meanwhile, incidents and allegations of game and match fixing continue to proliferate, while athletes — including college kids who may or may not even get paid through “NIL” deals — are regularly besieged with hostile social media attacks and threats for having failed to help bettors collect on “prop” bets.
And, of course, state government is also in on the action in a distinctly unhelpful way. At a recent Carolina Hurricanes hockey game — where every penalty on the opposing team is greeted by a flashing scoreboard and the P.A. announcer shouting “Your Hurricanes are on the Cash Pop Powerplay!!” (a reference to a betting game promoted by a team sponsor, the state “Education Lottery”), I heard a first or second grader in the row behind me shouting along “Cash Pop! Cash Pop!”
North Carolinians have wagered more than $6 billion on sports alone since the state legalized online sports betting last year and, of course, the industry’s take represented a big chunk of those billions.
As with most such voracious predators, however, too much is never enough and so it is that state lawmakers are advancing another bill to help make sure that those who lose money gambling — that is, almost everyone who bets — don’t try to kick the habit.
Under legislation recently approved by a state House committee, gambling losses would become deductible on state income tax returns.
Supporters, like sponsors Rep. Keith Kidwell (R-Beaufort) and Rep. Erin Paré (R-Wake), say such a change would merely align state and federal law and only makes sense since winnings are taxable. “Why should someone be taxed on, say, $1,000 in winnings if they later lost that much or more,” goes their reasoning.
But of course, what this argument conveniently ignores is that gambling losses are not like income declines that a taxpayer incurs as the result of a natural disaster, a stock market downturn, a business setback, or even a business expense or a charitable deduction.
The idea behind those kinds of tax deductions is to promote important and positive social objectives — like entrepreneurship, a healthy economy and a thriving nonprofit sector.
Gambling expenses and losses, in sharp contrast, are much more akin to money spent on entertainment. Indeed, that’s how the gambling industry has always sought to portray itself.
When one digs into the fine print of those gambling ads or the back pages of the North Carolina lottery website — places designed to make betting seem fun and wholesome that, undoubtedly, few bettors ever visit — the talk isn’t of “investments” or “profits”; it’s about “fun” and “entertainment.”
If North Carolina is going to start allowing people to deduct gambling losses, why shouldn’t it also allow the deduction of all kinds of personal entertainment expenses like concert tickets, pricey meals and luxury cruises? At least those deductions would go toward supporting industries that aren’t predicated on playing their customers for suckers.
Of course, one of the great ironies of the bill and the ongoing national gambling blitz itself is their close and supremely hypocritical alignment with the MAGA movement.
Rep. Kidwell is one of the legislature’s most ardent MAGA social conservatives — a lawmaker who has sought to criminalize abortion, roll back LGBTQ+ equality, and end virtually all regulation of guns for those 18 and older.
But as so often seems to be the case with a movement led by a supposedly Christian president who’s spent much of his adult life as a wheeler-dealer casino owner, the commitment to religious conservatism conveniently goes missing when the gambling lobby starts flexing its muscle.
Just ask the Rev. Mark Creech, former head of the Christian Action League and current lobbyist for the religious right group Return America, whose pleas against the bill and previous gambling expansions in the state were summarily ignored.
Many Democrats, of course, are on board with doing the gambling lobby’s bidding at every opportunity too, but at least for most of these pols, the hypocrisy isn’t so embarrassingly overt.
Will the legislation become law? At this point, it’s hard to imagine that an industry with all the money necessary to hire fleets of lobbyists and hand out boatloads of campaign cash — sports betting profits alone soared to $13.71 billion in 2024 — will be stymied. And with our state government actively working to develop and recruit a new generation of bettors, the house figures to keep winning and growing larger and ever more difficult to beat for the foreseeable future.