The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) reports that the rise in online sports betting paced an all-time monthly high in gambling revenue in November.
That approximately $623 million was up about $21 million from the previous record achieved in May. Year over year, this past November’s “profit” was up nearly 11 percent from November 2024, then the monthly revenue king at $562 million.
The PGCB says sports wagering revenues increased 27 percent-plus from November 2024 to November 2025, leading all category increases. And there’s rising concern that incentives given to those making sports book make suckers out of more and more of them.
Be that as it may, lost in all this talk of record numbers is that these “profits” are paid for by gamblers’ losses.
Gamble if you must. But the payoff typically is even worse than the proverbial “sucker’s bet” chances.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the net profit of a high-end Chicago steak house off a $500 live-fire, hearth-cooked steak is a mere $25.
Higher and higher overhead is cited, including the skyrocketing cost of beef. A “chef partner” tells The Journal what always has been the case with restaurants to varying degrees: The profit “margins are slim.”
Indeed, they typically are. Markups on alcohol can be an eatery’s saving grace.
But in what appears to be the newly growing climate, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, of diving into taxpayer pockets to make everything from building new buildings, to retrofitting old buildings and essentially bribing airlines to fly into respective airports — with deals that, in reality, incentivize failure by paying them when they don’t meet certain profit thresholds — to fallaciously make them “more affordable,” we all should be on guard in the new year for even more public subsidy schemes.
Public policy makers must reject once and for all caving to developers and businesses who insist that they somehow deserve public money because the returns on this project or that project “will more than pay” for the public subsidies sought.
Hey, if the returns are to be so grand, there should be no need for public subsidies, correct? Any lending institution seeing such data would not hesitate to front the money in pursuit of such “guaranteed” returns, right?
“It is all about risk mitigation,” reminds Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute. “They claim high rates of return but are not too sure. So, getting the taxpayer to share the risk while the business gets the profit is a sweet deal.”
The sooner the public – and the pols supposedly representing them – find the courage to use the facts to wave off such delusive sophists, the economic outlook near and far will be mightily better off.
Happy New Year, everybody. It will be much happier, however, if we can keep such shakedown artists at better bay in 2026.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
