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Wednesday, 4 October 2017

Congress should repeal sports gambling ban, let California chart its own path

Source: www.ocregister.com --- Tuesday, October 03, 2017
Southern California is now home to two NFL teams. And it has long been home to pro Baseball, basketball and soccer teams, as well as two of the biggest schools in college athletics. But if you want to bet on those teams, you’ll have to go to Las Vegas. The federal government’s outdated and counterproductive prohibition on sports betting needs to end. Passed by Congress in 1992, the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act bans states from introducing their own legal sports betting regimes, with Nevada being the sole exception. Like many prohibitions, PASPA was passed with good intentions but produced disastrous results. A new Reason Foundation report shows the negative outcomes PASPA has produced and the host of benefits states and regions like Southern California would enjoy from its repeal. Passed with the laudable intention of preventing game-fixing, PASPA’s original sponsors did not foresee what was to come. Instead of preventing corruption in sports, PASPA birthed a vast black market. Estimates suggest over $150 billion is bet on sports in America each year — 97 percent of it illegally. Not only are billions of dollars being pushed into the shadow economy but the integrity of sports is actually more endangered because of this prohibition. With law enforcement unable to watch betting patterns on the illegal gambling taking place, the risk of game-fixing actually goes up. PASPA also means Southern California is missing out ...



from Baseball http://ift.tt/2fK0wQR

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