The super bowl is coming up.
And so today we're talking about the most important part of sports gambling.
In 2018,
the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban
on sports betting that spurred four years of non stop ads,
enticing me and you
and everyone I know to spend all of our discretionary income on FanDuel or DraftKings.
At the time,
advocates believed
that the revenue streams that could come from sports betting were too good to pass up.
After the Great Recession, states were cash strapped and hungry for new sources of money.
States have unevenly legalized, meaning in some places you can log onto your phone and place a bet,
but in others, you might still need to go to a physical location.
The court left open other pathways for the federal government to curb or ban sports betting.
And.
And as many of the negative impacts of gambling have metastasized,
more policymakers are questioning whether legalization is worth the revenue.
My name is Jerusalem Dempsis.
I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic.
And this is good on paper,