“Pa. betting industry brought in nearly $7 billion in 2025,” read the headline in Friday’s Post-Gazette.
But it just as accurately could have read “Gamblers lost $7 billion betting in Pa. in 2025.”
Details the P-G:
“As gambling regulations soften around the country, Pennsylvania hauled in record-setting proceeds last year.
“The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, an independent state agency that regulates gambling, reported that the industry generated $6.8 billion in combined revenue in 2025 across all of its categories, which include slot machines, sports wagering and fantasy sports.
“It’s the highest single-year total in the state’s history, and a jump of more than 10 percent from $6.1 billion in 2024. Gambling revenue had spent years hovering around $3 billion until 2021 and has risen by around $500 million every year since.
“Tax revenue to the state was just under $3 billion, compared to $2.66 billion in 2024,” the P-G noted.
Ah, gambling, the legalized, state-sanctioned form, that is. It’s the vice now sold as the virtue that long ago was promised as the solution to all our public purpose money woes but instead was laundered to free riders and, come to think of it, free fliers.
Think of the barons of sport (It’s a hockey night in Pittsburgh, after all) and the spendthrifts of a particular airport. Ahem.
And it came with a crackdown on fraternal organizations that long have depended on various far smaller forms of gambling to continue to counter their razor-thin operating margins, if not their many – many – charitable efforts.
And now come also the virtuous alleged point-shavers of professional and college basketball. Can the “Hey, Sam, what’s the over-under on the Central Catholic-Mt. Lebanon game” be far behind?
It once was written that gambling is “a tax on people who are bad at math.” True, but widespread legalized gambling, regulations softened, also has become a tax on society, too often a way for “The State” to subsidize its favored, and wholly undeserving, private players.
Of course, gambling is not going away. And this gambling roulette will only grow. Losers will continue to lick their loss wounds and “The State” will continue to tout its record-setting proceeds. But, in reality, we’ll all be poorer for the experience.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
