Tuesday, May 19
Posted 11 a.m. EST
Did you miss me last week? I was AWOB, or absent without blogging, because the hubby and I were in Vegas, baby!
Our primary purpose for hitting Sin City was to see some shows -- a couple of Cirque du Soleil performances (Mystere and O), the zany Blue Man Group and the outrageous magic of Penn and Teller.
But you can't get to anything in Las Vegas without walking through casinos. And to make sure we had the complete "Lost Wages" experience, we did gamble. We definitely weren't whales; we confined our minimal betting to a single slot machine and walked away when we were $67 ahead.
Being big sports fans, we also dropped by a few sports book lounges. That's where you go to put down your money on athletic events and then watch whether you'll win or lose at one of the myriad TV screens sprinkled along the walls that also provide continual ticker updates of scores and odds.
It was NBA and NHL playoff time, so the sports books were crowded. But a lot of folks prefer to bet from the comfort of their own computer screens, even though that's technically illegal in the United States.
Online gamblers get a friend: Such gamblers -- and they are legion despite the restrictions of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, or UIGEA -- now have a new friend on Capitol Hill.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., has introduced legislation to repeal that essentially ineffective law and, as he put it in announcing his bill, "put an end to an inappropriate interference with their personal freedom."
Frank's Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement bill of 2009, or H.R. 2267, would instead regulate such gambling at the federal level. Internet gambling operators could obtain licenses authorizing them to accept bets and wagers from individuals in the United States.
Frank also is sponsoring H.R. 2266, the Reasonable Prudence in Regulation bill. It would delay implementation of additional UIGEA regulations set to go into effect on Dec. 1.
Essentially, Frank's bills would allow licensed Internet gambling operators to accept bets and wagers from U.S. residents as long as they met guidelines such as implementing protections against underage gambling, compulsive gambling, money laundering and fraud. The online betting firms also would have to follow all the various state prohibitions of and restrictions on gambling.
In return, the Treasury Department would license and regulate Internet gambling operators.
Frank didn't discuss the fiscal impact of his bills, but when he introduced similar legislation in the last Congress, a study commissioned by the UC Group (which has an online payments division) and conducted by accounting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers, estimated that the United States could raise nearly $52 billion in revenue over the next decade simply by lifting the current online gambling ban and taxing the winnings.
Now we wait and see and if that potential dollar amount combined with the growing federal deficit is enough to convince Frank's colleagues to support repeal of the no-online-betting law this time.
Meanwhile, remember that regardless of how you place your bets, your winnings are taxable income.
What about the folks who are charged with collection on your payouts? The IRS doesn't comment on legislation, pending or enacted, but given the challenges the agency faces collecting its part of gambling income, I suspect the agency would happily take any help it could get.