The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Jeffrey Goldfarb

NEW YORK, July 8 (Reuters Breakingviews) - For countless communities, the rapid creep of gambling into every corner of modern life is a losing bet. Practically everything can be wagered now, with market-makers in lotteries, stocks or the vaguest of predictions enabling mass speculation on the mundane and the inane. Imposing tougher rules on the often-harmful behavior would be welcome, but at this stage per-bet levies offer better odds of a politically viable fix.

Gamification has gone wild in the United States and beyond. Everything from savings accounts to political races are used to hook consumers with casino-like temptation. The array of options follows a surge in legalized sports betting, giant sweepstakes and trading apps designed with powerful psychological triggers.

Americans placed nearly $170 billion of legal wagers on football and other games last year, about the same amount they spent paying for concerts, TV streaming services, watching movies, listening to music and buying books combined. Sales of scratch-off and Powerball tickets reached $105 billion in 2025. Prediction sites operated by companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket are expected to handle $240 billion of event contracts this year and $1 trillion by 2030, much of it from the United States, according to Bernstein analysts.

A lot of it flows from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 landmark verdict legalizing sportsbooks. Since then, the annual tally of internet searches related to gambling addiction also jumped by nearly a quarter, to some 7 million nationally, with evidence of even bigger increases following usage of online apps such as DraftKings DKNG.O and Flutter-owned FanDuel, according to research from the University of California San Diego Qualcomm Institute and School of Medicine.

The rate of suicide among those suffering with gambling disorders is 15 times higher than in the general population, one Swedish study found, while at least 4% of suicides in the Australian region home to Melbourne were gambling-related, according to the World Health Organization. Bombarded with betting advertisements and 24-hour wagers on mobile phones, nearly 80% of 18-to-22-year-old respondents to a survey by the NCAA collegiate sports organization said they place at least a few sports bets a year, with 4% doing so daily.

Just as stars Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra and Ted Williams once endorsed tobacco products, A-list celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Drake and Lionel Messi are now hawking sports betting sites and predictions markets. The difference is that the public wasn’t widely alerted to the link between smoking and lung cancer until the U.S. Surgeon General released a milestone report in 1964. The dangers of gambling addiction are more widely recognized: nearly eight in 10 Americans say it's as serious as or more serious than other addictions, a Harris Poll conducted for the National Council on Problem Gambling found.

After sports leagues resisted any association with betting for decades, gambling brands are now emblazoned on team uniforms, stadiums and broadcasts, while journalists and commentators on Walt Disney-owned ESPN and other networks promote in-game bets and other wagers. Corruption, meanwhile, proliferates. Former NBA players Malik Beasley and Ed Davis last month became the latest in a sprawling federal gambling probe to be accused of cheating.

Local governments long ago entered an uneasy pact with these forces. Lottery tickets are often bought by those who can least afford to spend on the astronomically remote chance at winning $1 billion jackpots. Revenue from such sales, however, helps fund state budgets. Today's bewildering array of choices offers fewer offsetting benefits.

Robinhood HOOD.O, eToro and other trading sites turn investing into a game, contributing to record inflows of retail money to the markets. Surging prediction forums enable users to make binary bets against each other on anything from the FIFA World Cup winner to Taylor Swift’s wedding location, and almost everything else in between. Cryptocurrencies are effectively an exercise in gambling, with few use cases and no fundamental value beyond offering a way to bet on prices going up or down.

The bills for all this activity have gone largely untallied, but are almost certainly enormous. There’s lost workplace productivity, job absences, healthcare treatments, personal bankruptcies, social services and family-related expenses related to divorce and more, to name a few. Opportunity costs also abound, with so much money diverted to unproductive uses.

Raising the legal betting age or banning gambling-related ads during athletic competitions might help to slow the tide. Cracking down on prediction markets, particularly if they stray into allowing bets on taboo topics, also makes sense. Britain has banned paying for wagers with credit cards, imposed strict stake limits, introduced a program that enables bettors to block themselves from all licensed sites at once, and required financial checks on gamblers who breach spending thresholds in a 24-hour period.

It is difficult, however, for politicians to defy powerful lobbying groups or their own gambling constituents. A more palatable approach might be the promise of new revenue. So-called Tobin taxes – small, flat, per-transaction fees – would work a treat. Designed correctly, they can curb speculative, high-volume trades while also generating funds to help pay for the broad societal costs resulting from private activity, as British economist Arthur Pigou argued. Everyone from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to Pope Benedict XVI has endorsed their usage in financial markets to deter risky trading.

One U.S. state, Illinois, offers a test case. A year ago, Governor JB Pritzker imposed a 25-cent tax on the first 20 million online sports wagers at each licensed operator. The tax doubles after that, adding to other levies on the industry’s revenue. Early results are promising. Although the total amount bet on pro sports online dropped 5% in April, to $1.2 billion, from a year earlier, the number of wagers fell by 25%, to around 25 million. The U.S. gaming industry argues that more taxes simply push consumers into offshore, unregulated and other illegal markets, citing some $675 billion of such wagers, derived from opaque survey methodology.

Despite these debatable contentions, similar Tobin-tax logic and policies could be applied in other states and at the national level, or to prediction contracts, crypto transactions and even lotteries. Governments are suffering a broad decline in cigarette- and alcohol-related tax revenue. Gambling, at least in this context, offers a lot of action and significant rewards.

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