I don't think that straight up banning things is the best answer, but clearly, legal sports betting comes with a high cost - to individuals and to the society as a whole. So barriers should exist.
You may stop short of making sport gambling illegal, but you should at least make it annoying. Completely ban advertising it, for one. Set harsh legal limits on user spending - so that the betting companies aren't incentivized to burn through their users and extract the entire life savings out of them.
Harsh legal limits seems obvious to me. If society benefits at all from sports betting, all that benefit happens in the first few hundred bucks of spending. Meanwhile all the biggest harms to society are happening when people spend a lot.
The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
> The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
The lawmakers care primarily about the wants of their corporate donors, which is why this legalized gambling situation arose, and also why you have many geriatric congress people on both sides of the aisle suddenly very interested in legitimizing crypto with soft "regulation".
Cigarettes and alcohol both have advertising heavily regulated/banned. The government just needs to make a public health argument which is easy enough here
They would have to stop pushing their own gambling sites to accomplish that. 45 States have lotteries they aren't going to give up, and one of the other five has legal casino gambling.
You may stop short of making sport gambling illegal, but you should at least make it annoying. Completely ban advertising it, for one. Set harsh legal limits on user spending - so that the betting companies aren't incentivized to burn through their users and extract the entire life savings out of them.