Betting On Football Is Bad For You

Before I get started, I want to say that I am not telling people who don’t want to bet on football games to all of the sudden go out and start betting their hard earned money, I am not endorsing any particular casino nor am I endorsing any gaming website of any kind; what I will be doing in this article is stating my opinion on the hypocrisy and anti-freedom of choice decisions made by our United States Congress in banning Internet gaming, which, of course, includes sports wagering.

I have been dumbfounded by the ban since it went into effect in 2006. For those do not know, it was attached to the Safe Port Act on the last day of the congressional session for 2006 and is oddly treated kind of like an “oh by the way” thing.

The act is really all about combating terrorism—it really doesn’t have a lot to do with gambling at all—until page 213 they start talking about Internet gaming. More specifically the act talks about the funding of U.S. customer accounts at Internet gaming sites and there in lies the rub.

While the law does not make it illegal for U.S. citizens to use internet gaming sites it makes it illegal for U.S. citizens to directly fund these accounts.

Of course, it doesn’t take the smart people too long to figure out ways around that, but, it doesn’t mean that it makes it a simple process either, therefore removing a large segment of the U.S. populations right to freedom of choice.

Most U.S. banks at this point have blocked their users credit and debit cards for use with sites associated with online gaming; these cards were by far the easiest and most common way to fund accounts.

So at this point, some readers of this article who may have stumbled upon it because they Googled something and this came up or they were referred to it by a friend who regularly reads my football stuff might say: “Well that’s good because gambling is bad” or they may agree with congress who talks in the bill about many credit card collection proceedings occurring because of Internet gambling debts.

You know what, I agree with them in this regard and say that if Internet gambling is truly the primary reason for debt collection then they have a valid point, but, I just don’t believe it is the only major reason.

I also strongly believe that people who gamble more than recreationally may even have a problem for which they should get help for.

However, I do not agree with several things.

Firstly I am going to call out many of the U.S. congressmen particularly those who attended some of the more prominent schools in the Ivy League as those schools were built largely with money raised by lotteries and therefore gambling money.

If these congressmen voted to approve the act what they are saying that as long as the proceeds of the gambling directly benefit them then it is O.K.; I can only hope that others can see that it isn’t.

Secondly, many states if not most, have a lottery system in place. These lotteries, when passed, were supposed to help education and things of that nature. So the congressmen who voted in the Port Act are saying, if the voters want a lottery in their state, then gambling in the form that the voters decide is O.K. Hmmm.

Now we get into the whole freedom of choice issue. if gambling as a practice is legal in most states, then why can’t people choose what kind of gambling they want to do; and furthermore, as long as gambling is taxed and regulated  why can’t people gamble with whomever they want.

While I don’t think offshore sports books (or any online gambling establishment for that matter) fall into the category of taxed and regulated, that is a choice the U.S. congress and U.S. government have chosen.

There certainly is a demand for online gaming and the country could probably make quite a nice income from it, far better than the futile, and somewhat silly attempts, to extract more money from smokers or drinkers or whomever else they feel are easy targets. Then again, when they are taxing things like gas maybe they think we are all easy targets.

I am sure that internet gambling is not the major problem with debt collection in America today. I think the U.S. economy in general has had a far greater effect.

When gas prices quadrupled congress didn’t stop the gas companies from raising prices because they felt Americans are addicted to gas or because this area of an average American’s expenses were quadrupling in a very short period of time.

How congress can even mention debt collection in the act is absurd in itself.

Can you even imagine a health bill trying to ban Ben and Jerry’s or Baskin Robbins? It’s basically the same thing they are doing with gaming except the Ice Cream abuse is far more wide spread, accessible, and accepted, therefore causing more issues than internet gambling ever did.

If they were to outlaw ice cream, cookies, pizza and other fattening foods we love, maybe they can even get me to write the act for them.

I can tell you it would go something like this:

I know this bill is really about terrorism or gas taxes but, it’s the last day of the congressional sessions and the health care companies are paying us congressmen a ton of money and they say we haven’t been helping them out too much lately.

They say their costs are going up and it’s mainly because people aren’t eating well enough and Americans are just getting too big. The health care companies are saying its the food now; we just can’t blame it all on the smokers anymore because a lot of them are dead now and we just taxed the rest right out of their God-given freedom to smoke.

No one smokes anymore, and even if they did they aren’t allowed to smoke anywhere, anyhow. Thus, we have no one left to blame and the health care companies are not making enough money to give us congressmen the decent kick-backs and slush fund payoffs we’re accustomed to, so we are going to have to say goodbye to the foods we love the most, the ones that aren’t good for us.

We’ll start with the sweet stuff and move on from there later. I mean we can’t just ban eating altogether, yet. To be honest, those Ben and Jerry guys were just a little too fat for our liking anyway—same with those pizza guys. If they all could have just stayed skinny like Mrs. Fields we wouldn’t have to do this.

This of course will be buried in the back of the bill so no one even notices it’s been passed until it is too late. You see maybe twenty five or thirty years ago this all could have been justified but today I just don’t see it.

When I leave the downtown area of Chicago, I see billboards early and often advertising a land based or river boat casino close by. I see race tracks and OTB outlets. I see Lottery sales on almost every street corner inside the city as well. I don’t just see this here in Illinois or neighboring Indiana, I see this everywhere I travel.

Sports books are not the norm and in the United States, they are currently only legal in Nevada but casino gambling is everywhere. So according to congress, U.S. based companies can have casinos in any state that says it’s O.K. or to open a horse or dog racing establishment but people are not allowed to bet on their sport of choice?

To me, betting is betting, gambling is gambling. Are some forms of gambling more dangerous than others? Maybe, but I doubt it.

We know that a Baskin Robbins Oreo Milkshake is north of 120 fat grams and 2200 calories and a Chipotle Chicken Burrito is 60+ fat grams and north of 1400 calories, yet, I guess this is better for us than plunking down a few bucks to see if we are right in our assessment that a certain team can beat another certain team on a given Saturday.

Like I said at the beginning, this is more about consistency and freedom of choice than anything else. I just get that eerie feeling that maybe someone at the offshore books didn’t make the checks large enough before slipping them in the congressmen’s pockets.