During Thursday’s State of the Industry webinar, American Gaming Association President and CEO Bill Miller touted the gaming industry’s benefits, noting the gaming industry provides 1.8 million jobs and $53 billion in tax revenue.
“To put that in perspective, $53 billion exceeds the annual budgets of 34 individual states, including large states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Illinois,” Miller said. “That’s a massive impact in communities across the country.”
But the gaming industry also faces an existential threat because of the rise of prediction markets.
According to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the prediction market operators are no more than “rogue cowboys.”
“Take my word for it, six years that we were fighting court, six losses in court before we finally won the seventh time at the United States Supreme Court to birth an industry where the American people, who are sports crazy citizens, who love our major sports at the MLB and the NHL and the NBA and NFL and the NCAA, they love it,” Christie said in a conversation with AGA Senior Vice President, Government Relations Chris Cylke.
“This gives a way for them to participate in it, and they’ve gotten used to it. Now these rogue cowboys are throwing a monkey wrench into it in a way that is going to hurt consumers and hurt the integrity of the sports that those consumers love.”
Christie noted the government body overseeing prediction markets, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, is miscast as a determining body. Prediction markets, Christie said, do not provide a commodity.
“This is a bet,” Christie said. “Everyone knows what it is. It is a bet on a game and it’s not a commodity. It’s not something that is even in their ballpark to regulate. These prediction markets are putting it out there in a way that twists what the CFTC really is supposed to be doing. And it makes no sense. I think the public, if they understood it, would not see that as a commodity.”
Christie noted that after the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, every jurisdiction in the United States had a chance to jump on the sports betting train. Forty have, leaving 10 states without sports betting.
But prediction markets are subverting this paradigm.
“What these prediction markets are doing is going into the 40 states where there’s a regulatory scheme and saying we’re not going to comply and we’re not going to pay taxes, we’re just going to do what we want to do,” Christie said. “And in the 10 states who say we don’t want regulated casino gaming, too bad, we’re going to bring it to anyway. It’s disrespectful of all 50 states. It violates the laws of all 50 states.
“And I think that over the course of time, either the courts or our political institutions are going to say this is not what we bargained for.”
Miller noted other achievements over the past year in gaming, noting raising the tax threshold on jackpots to $2,000. But everything is at risk if prediction markets are allowed to proceed.
“We’re the only association representing all sectors of gaming, commercial and tribal operators, manufacturers and suppliers,” Miller said. “We work to further the interests of both brick-and-mortar casinos and the online gaming offerings, and only our members offer the true omnichannel experience that customers demand.
“We represent the backbone of the industry members who invest in communities for long-term success, unlike our competitors, who just swoop in, extract what they can and never provide any value to those same local communities, members who operate with transparency and integrity, working with communities to help achieve their goals, rather than just looking for a loophole to exploit.”
