AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
As sports betting grows across the country, so do concerns about gambling addiction. Sports betting is legal in 39 states and D.C., and states can get billions of dollars in tax revenue from it. In Colorado, some lawmakers are trying to enact one of the most ambitious reforms to sports betting in the nation. Colorado Public Radio's Ben Markus is following that closely and joins us now. Hello.
BEN MARKUS, BYLINE: Hey. Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: Ben, you've covered the sports betting industry from the start. How did it begin in Colorado?
MARKUS: So Colorado was an early adopter. Once the U.S. Supreme Court essentially allowed states to opt in, starting in 2018, a bipartisan group of lawmakers here pushed for it, and now it's collected more than a hundred million dollars in tax revenue since 2022. Colorado uses it for water projects. It's super dry here. Other states send the tax money to schools or local governments. Nationwide, the tax revenue from sports gambling adds up to about $3 billion in 2024, and some states have gone so far as to increasing their sports gambling taxes to help plug budget holes, like in Maryland.
RASCOE: In some ways, it seems like it's benefiting states financially. But like we mentioned at the top, some in Colorado are pushing for tighter regulations. Why?
MARKUS: Yeah. That's right. That's being partly led by state Senator Matt Ball. He's a Democrat from Denver, big sports fan, father to a young kid, and the constant advertising, the ease of access on phone apps really has him worried about a generation of young people becoming addicted and chasing losses into financial ruin. Here's Senator Ball at a recent committee hearing.
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MATT BALL: It is the only addiction where you think that the cure for your addiction is doing that thing one more time.
RASCOE: And what does he want to do about it?
MARKUS: So he sponsored a bill that would do a lot of things. It would limit the number of times a day someone can deposit money into the gambling apps. It would restrict certain push notifications from the apps on your phone. It would ban the use of credit cards, and it would force the state to collect and study data from sportsbooks.
RASCOE: Do other states have these guardrails?
MARKUS: Yeah. No other state has gone this far all at once. New York, a couple years ago - they passed a law that requires warnings about the potential of addiction, also requires addiction helpline phone numbers in ads. In Michigan, there's a proposal that would limit advertising to youth.
RASCOE: So it sounds like states are trying to impose some limits, but they still really want that tax money, right?
MARKUS: Yeah. That is a big part of the debate, this tension between not wanting to harm people but states themselves almost getting addicted to the money it brings in. And the tax money is largely dependent on people losing their bets, increasing revenues for the sportsbooks. My research in Colorado of tax data shows that sports gamblers seem to be losing a greater proportion of their money every year.
RASCOE: So the sportsbooks are getting better at beating the betters?
MARKUS: It seems to be part of it. A big part of that is prop bets. So we've gone well beyond the vanilla bet, the will your team win or lose? Now you can bet on almost any outcome in a game - things like individual player performance, how many goals, how many rebounds a player will have. And sportsbooks have heavily promoted prop bets and risky combination bets, so you have to win multiple legs of a bet for your bet to win. It's a high-risk, high-reward bet. Lawmakers here tried unsuccessfully to ban prop bets. They're so popular that it really would've hurt tax collection, so it was pulled from the bill. And the context here is that Colorado faces one of its biggest budget deficits ever this year. There just is no additional money.
RASCOE: That's Colorado Public Radio's Ben Markus. Thank you so much for joining us.
MARKUS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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