[baggachipz]

The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

[xg15]

What I find almost as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.

We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

[reaperducer]

What I find almost just as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.

The gambling industry has been trying to normalize gambling for decades.

I first ran into this in the mid-90's when the PR woman for a race track told me not to call it "gambling," but instead to call it "gaming."

We see gambling language used everywhere now, if you know what to look for. Terms like "all in" and "table stakes" are gambling terms,† but people use them every day in regular conversation.

† Though "all in" was used as far back as the 1930's to mean "very tired," I hardly ever hear anyone use it that way anymore.

[georgemcbay]

> CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

As someone who doesn't pay much attention to traditional news stations much these days, I was kind of taken aback by the over-the-top product placements they do now when exposed to it.

See for example:

https://youtu.be/9BPO-swW5eo?si=vLExNIXfeQmYHIDc&t=340

@5:40 (if your platform doesn't carry over the timestamp)

Polymarket/Kalshi are far more damaging to society than soda, but seeing this I was struck by how we've reached a point where the old Wayne's World product placement gag wouldn't even read as satire anymore, that's just how things actually are now.

[ToucanLoucan]

We are incredibly market-brained at this point. A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking among people who act completely irrationally with incredible regularity.

Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.

[Terr_]

> A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking

It also tends to assume a certain hypothetical ideal of perfect information, where all prices and transactions are public, secret deals don't exist, and ownership/interests are never hidden.

[buddhu]

Information asymmetry is one of those things that is so obvious that you'd expect it to be fundamental to economics, but it wasn't until the mid-90s that mainstream economics started to take it seriously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

[Spooky23]

It’s the logical next step for the crypto bros. At this point it’s just political patronage for the small time MAGA grifters who are outside of the big boy financial frauds.

[hebleb]

It may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again

[rescripting]

There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.

With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...

We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.

[nradov]

That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.

Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.

[taurath]

Just start a small business, or build wealth through real estate is a take that indicates some severe divorce from the reality of poverty in America.

You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).

Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.

This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.

> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places

I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.

[jcranmer]

Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels. While the advice is difficult, almost impossible, for most to apply, it is sometimes applicable.

One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect.

[taurath]

> Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels.

This is not a super relevant statement as it can be made with a single example - the rate of mobility is down relative to when those who'd give the advice experienced (which has been compounding for at least the last 30 years, some say since the 1970s).

According to one economist in 2020, in the U.S., absolute mobility, the chance a child earns more than their parents, has fallen from about 90% to roughly 50%. Source: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/05/16/two-leadi...

> the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless

Social segregation also plays a really important role too, and cross class relationships have plummeted - as someone who is doing well but didn't go to college, the relationship building in college is a factor that will work against me my entire life.

I would never say that upward mobility is impossible, or that its not worth it to strive for it. I am saying that dismissing headwinds due to no guarantee of success doesn't really take into account severely constrained actual access to opportunity that continues to become more constrained over time.

[6510]

> Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people

Ah right, after a 14 hour shift you've left your car half way as that was how far she could take you. You are now on your knees with the god of all migraines, around you are small mountains of laundry as you fail to repair the washing machine while your ramen gets cold. Your mind locked in a loop, if I pay this bill how will I buy food, I need to pay this bill, I need to buy food. Then POOF suddenly it strikes you that you could start your own business. Adrenaline rushes though your veins. The whole business lasts about 20 seconds before you wake up in the laundry, shit what time is it, fk I have to walk to work.

[nradov]

If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor.

Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.

[taurath]

> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable

I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult.

Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while housing has gone up 136%, healthcare up 180%, food up 100% and transportation up 120%. Thats a different playing field.

The point being made isn't that failure has any inevitability. Most people will be able to make it work enough to live, and those who can't due to choices, trauma, disability, drug use, or excessive bad luck are the homeless people you see begging on freeway offramps and intersections. At the economy level its a numbers game. It will never be impossible to make it big, in the same way that some people with every single advantage will end up on the street without a penny.

[6510]

> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable.

Exactly! This is the mind set. So tell me, how do you progress when you are there?

Or even better, now that we've accumulated many people conditioned by streaks of failure, how do we maximize their productivity and tax revenue? Should be an easy question for you :)

[throwitaway222]

This is why immigrants are often the most exemplar people of the American Dream today. Most of the people today pushing socialist or communist agendas are not these immigrants, but instead children of very wealthy company owners that only saw a downward trend from their parent's trajectory. It's from that privileged that they found fighting for other people their cause. However it's misguided and they don't even understand this. They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world. And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff. Meanwhile these people just keep pushing it to college students and the cycle continues. No matter how many times you tell them that it hasn't worked before they always respond with well it hasn't been done "right", and even current attempts in the United States are causing nearly unlimited fraud, they won't listen. The current philosophy of these people is to break the United States so badly that the only trajectory could be up. It's almost like they're seeing their own failures as people and want to replicate it for the country. Stop treating everyone as a victim, stop being a victim and you'll see the world shine.

Steps off soap box.

[giantrobot]

I don't know what you mean, I mean I made a million dollars with only a small hundred million dollar loan from my dad! This sort of entrepreneurship is available to anyone in America.¹

¹ Terms and conditions apply.

[scottyah]

The propagation of this type of mindset is more damaging than the gambling.

[Analemma_]

“Building wealth through real estate” should not be possible, and it’s half the reason we’re in this mess: people treating their homes as a store of wealth and blocking new construction to protect the value of their investment has locked young people out of the housing market. Hence all the gambling. What you should be hoping is that YIMBY policies carry the day in the end and “building wealth through real estate” is eliminated as a thing.

[throwitaway222]

> Building wealth through real estate should not be possible

I am sympathetic to this argument, but there are problems. How do you get homes built if you make this change?

[Analemma_]

Construction companies can still turn a profit building and selling them. The idea is that houses should be depreciating assets, like cars. If houses are appreciating in value it means you're not building enough of them.

[myrmidon]

By people paying for houses they actually want to live in?

Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").

[lenerdenator]

> The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.

Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.

I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?

[criddell]

> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job.

College never guaranteed anything.

A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment:

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col...

Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).

[mullingitover]

> There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future.

Gambling is the closest we've come to figuring out how to directly tax hope.

[mrguyorama]

People who say they use gambling to "dream" or "Hope" are just coping.

You don't have to spend a single penny to dream or hope some sort of better outcome for yourself in the next few days that has much better odds than winning the lottery.

They just like gambling.

[mullingitover]

> They just like gambling.

So why to people suffering from poverty like gambling so much more than everyone else?

[walls]

Because it's the only possible way out for them.

[roadside_picnic]

> no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future

This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy.

But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor.

[Avicebron]

Well said. It's an unspoken "secret" as well that state gambling is a tax on the poor, feeding on desperation. This isn't even funding taxes though, just lining these companies and their insiders pockets.

[afavour]

> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.

...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.

[PhilipRoman]

If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis.

[afavour]

I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself".

[dheera]

> We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling

No, instead we should tackle the actual root of the problem, and fix the economy. If everyone can make a living, afford housing, find jobs, and find something they love to do that pays, and get medical care they need, they won't turn to these things.

[SpicyLemonZest]

They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening.

[deaton]

Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.

[doctorwho42]

What's being a millionaire in 20 years going to be worth?

[xg15]

The irony being that gambling is about as far from "guaranteed" or "stable" as you can get.

But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it.

[criddell]

The best way to win at gambling is to be the house.

[natebc]

Really it's the only way to win at gambling.

[mothballed]

Even better, be the guy that taxes the house and winners, sells the licensing to the house (or friends of them that have privileged advantage to sell compliance services), or the guys who determine whether the house gets its zoning or construction exemptions.

[tavavex]

How is that better? Taxes are a cut of the profits and they mostly are spent back on other goods and services. The owners of the gambling business take the remaining majority of the money and use it to scale themselves up, remove competition or to enrich their ranks. If you want to exist as a parasite, option #2 is the way to go.

It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?"

The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-dictatorships to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky public governments.

[aqme28]

Unfortunately, the gambling industry is going to have a much wealthier and more powerful lobby than any effort to displace it.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Money is important, but there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to lobbying and campaigning. Elon's success at putting candidates into office isn't great, despite flooding massive amounts of cash into several elections.

Candidates themselves and the way they campaign matters more. Cuomo had 3x the warchest than Mamdani had, for example.

Small dollar donations can also level the playing field for candidates that can gain some national appeal (this does come with its own set of problems and perverse incentives, though)

[kevinob11]

How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.

[nradov]

We would need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that spending money on political campaigns doesn't count as an exercise of freedom of speech (1st Amendment). The Supreme Court Citizens United v. FEC decision was built on that legal foundation. We can argue about whether the court's interpretation was correct or politicized, and it might be reversed someday by different justices, but ultimately the only stable solution will be an amendment.

[ndiddy]

Any sort of reform that would successfully get money out of politics would require a constitutional amendment. I have little faith that the current Congress would pass any sort of amendment that would eliminate the system they benefit from unless there was at least a reasonable possibility that the states would call for an Article V convention, but the state legislatures also benefit from the current corrupt system so I don't see this happening either. You can't wholesale replace Congress either because the lack of term limits and the staggered terms means that the special interest groups that benefit from corruption will try to primary candidates before you can build up a critical mass (see what happened to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush).

[Terr_]

One approach is to reduce discontinuities and spoiler-effects in voting, which in turn reduces the incentives for a politician to accept—or someone else to offer—a devil's bargain. As it stands now, there's lots of potential for: "Do me a favor and my money will push you the small distance that distinguishes total defeat from total victory."

That leads to some game theory and math, with things like some form of ranked-voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, and maybe even proportional-representation rather than lots of just-one-winner races.

[FergusArgyll]

I think some places have the government give every party equal (by what measure? I don't remember. Past votes maybe?) money for campaigning and no donations are allowed.

[wahnfrieden]

Japan has such rules. They have absolutely massive decades-long scandals with money corrupting their politics, and ongoing right now.

[FergusArgyll]

I'm sure, I was just trying to help with

> I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.

[wahnfrieden]

It begins with hierarchy

Others have offered contrived rules for solving it through policy, but these don't account for how to get those with power over us to institute such rules to bind their own hands and then to follow the rules to their own detriment

[Avicebron]

I'm curious. Can you flesh out what it begins wirh hierarchy means?

[wahnfrieden]

Try reading Graeber/Wengrow

[throwaway27448]

Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....

[dieselgate]

Genuinely curious what the golden goose refers to here?

[throwaway27448]

There's a lot of money in gambling. Nobody seems to want do anything that might depress the economy, even if it means the death of democracy.

[topgrain2]

See also: the healthcare system, and the military.

We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)

[Spooky23]

The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.

Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.

About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.

[ASalazarMX]

How does that even work in a democracy that has systemic flaws, where the elections boil down to which candidate had the most financial support? USA's democracy is beyond fixing, it needs a complete refactoring amd stronger checks before elections of both candidates and officials become meaningful for regular citizens.

[wahnfrieden]

Only works with fair elections

[keiferski]

Society needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones.

The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.

[peder]

Rediscovering first principles

[ASalazarMX]

I'm not buying that. We know vices are bad not because they're immoral, but because they are harmful to the self and others. Knowing what's harmful doesn't require imaginary superadults, just common sense.

[thrance]

I disagree with your assessment, the ban wasn't undone because of secularism. In fact, this prediction market craze was embraced by the right almost instantly, which is the side currently most favored by Christians.

[keiferski]

Gambling bans have been slowly undone for decades. This isn’t something that happened in the recent MAGA populist era; which is the portion of the right that seems to be okay with the gambling stuff.

[thrance]

I mean, white evangelicals largely sided with Trump last year, so I don't know how cleanly you can separate Christianity (as it currently exists in the USA) from MAGA populism and what policies the movement favors.

[keiferski]

I don’t think it’s that difficult. Evangelicals’ beliefs and who they vote for are not the same thing; they largely seem to have voted for his Supreme Court nominees and consequently decisions like Roe. That’s a reality of a two party system.

Evangelicals are also but one branch of Christianity, something like a third of American Christians, so to suggest that it is the same is wrong from the start.

[testbjjl]

Feels like we’re the ones being put in a bottle as rational thinking, integrity, consideration of the greater good on all things big and small are interpreted as being weak and/or arresting people’s freedoms. When you forget hard learned lessons, they have a way of reminding you eventually.

[Spooky23]

Something bad will happen, and the idiots will just follow whatever the next thing is.

[spike021]

Even something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.

[jorts]

I was taking an Uber from Sonoma back to the Bay, and the driver was one of those people. He wouldn't stop talking about how he was spending thousands a month on rare cards, then reselling them, all the while losing money, his wife, etc.

[spike021]

I really got into baseball cards a few years back. It is fun to collect for favorite players and all but once you realize it's a money pit you either are too deep and addicted or you're able to wean yourself back off it.

Fortunately it was the latter for me. I'd love to keep buying the stuff but it's such a waste. Better to buy singles I actually want. It's just not as fun as me being the one who pulled the card.

[Austiiiiii]

Yeah, the prevailing fear (at least out loud) is that going after "outcome markets" would open Pandora's box on everything from options and futures to the very concept of insurance. Obviously there's a huge and easily definable difference, but people love their slippery slopes, and nuanced discussion would mean giving up an easy way for connected people to cash in on non-public knowledge.

[spacechild1]

> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle

Just ban or regulate it? It's only a form gambling after all.

[martythemaniak]

Here's an answer for you: we need a new temperance movement.

Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it.

A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc.

Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.

[allthetime]

"I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle"

laws, that's how. push it back down to the dark net where most people can't be bothered to get at it.

[blini-kot]

there was a certain approach tried back in 1917 in Russia

isn't without its issues of course, but you know, desperate times call for desperate measures

[dheera]

I mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money.

Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.

[smelendez]

I’d put working for tips in here as well.

From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.

Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.

[ambicapter]

Conflating unavoidable risk in life with games designed to entice you to play while guaranteeing that you will lose is certainly some sort of perverse argument.

[dheera]

I'm not conflating anything here.

Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises.

You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way.

In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.

[reaperducer]

Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs.

Your entire argument sounds very much like how certain religions are against insurance because they view it as gambling.

It's led to the rise of an even riskier practice of shared health benefit pools, which market themselves as not being insurance even though they're pretty much the same thing as "mutual insurance," except that when you need them most, suddenly they're not insurance at all.

It also sounds very young. When you get over a certain age, you WILL use up that FSA. Every. Single. Year.

And if you're young enough not to, there are plenty of over-the-counter everyday goods that qualify for FSA, like Tylenol.

[dheera]

> there are plenty of over-the-counter everyday goods

Yep, that's how you've been sucked into the system. Oh, you didn't spend as much as you planned? We'll steal the rest of the budget unless you go buy some name-brand Tylenol that you don't actually need just to fill up the hard-earned money that you marked up as FSA that are on the verge of being stolen. That's the flip side of the casino: either the FSA admin pockets your cash, or Tylenol (TM) pockets your cash, or the IRS pockets your cash, depending on which direction in the triangle you mis-priced your needs.

Also, generic acetaminophen is cheap, and works just as well. If you're buying name-brand Tylenol just to fill up remnant FSA dollars, you aren't saving money.

> you WILL use up that FSA. Every. Single. Year.

It's strictly better to abolish the FSA and just let you tax-deduct your medical expenses. You win, the young ones also win. But no, the system wants to put the FSA casino in the way so that it can bank a few extra dollars off the young folks.

If you don't see it blindingly obvious that this is strictly better, and STILL want to play the FSA game, you've either been brainwashed by the system as well, or you've become part of the system in upholding something that is predatory.

[SoftTalker]

An FSA should not be a "bet" it should be set up for expenses you know you are going to need to pay: dependent care, recurring care and prescriptions, planned procedures. Your employer, not you, owns the account and keeps any balance remaining at the end of the year so you should not really guess at how much you contribute. An advantage of the FSA is that the full contribution is available immediately but the payroll deductions are spread over the whole year.

[everforward]

Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.

My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?

I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.

[SoftTalker]

Again, the FSA is for known expenditures, not unknown or variable. It's not perfect and I'm not really even defending it; I think an HSA is generally a better idea but the FSA does have certain specific advantages.

[vel0city]

But for a ton of people that amount is extremely variable. Do you plan on getting into a car accident? Do you plan on getting an appendectomy in June when making your elections the November before? Sorry doctor, getting cancer wasn't in the plans for 2026, can we reschedule that to 2027 after my open enrollment?

I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?

[topgrain2]

Requiring certain healthcare plans to access HSAs is the only thing that keeps HSAs from primarily being (in terms of amount of tax income lost to the program) a benefit for the upper-middle-class and higher, i.e. a regressive redistribution scheme.

Optimal (maximizing your benefit... and also cost in lost tax receipts) use of HSAs requires not touching the money until retirement. You pay medical bills with non-HSA money and keep the HSA money invested and growing tax-advantaged, like an extra retirement account. Spending the money you put in every year offers relatively tiny gains compared to keeping it in those accounts for decades.

Your options to mitigate this are to limit access, or to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term, approaches to which look kinda FSA-like.

[vel0city]

> to make it undesirable to keep money in them long-term

We could just continue to enforce the 20% penalty indefinitely to get rid of the concept of these accounts turning into retirement accounts.

FSAs benefit the upper-middle-class and wealthy more than poor people as well. You'll see quite a bit more savings when your top end tax rate is 35% than 12%. They're also far more likely to be able to plan on setting aside some portion of their incomes into a FSA at enrollment time rather than the bigger effects of the gamble with lower income earners; the outcomes of the risk of overfunding is way more impactful for someone making little money.

The tax benefit helping the wealthy more seems to me to move more towards eliminating the tax advantages of healthcare spending entirely.

[SoftTalker]

Even if you spend the money you put in to an HSA every year, you still saved the marginal income tax on that money, which is a lot better return than most other short-term "safe" ways you might save for unexpected expenses.

[topgrain2]

Yes, it provides some benefits to fund one's HSA even if one spends all that money in the same year, but the cost of the program (in terms of tax income lost, including the time-cost of it) is far higher for accounts that don't do that, and instead spend none of the money on healthcare.

Like, remove the eligibility restrictions and just about 100% of people with a financial planner would soon have an HSA they intend not to touch until retirement, and those accounts would represent a large proportion of the cost of the program (most of it, in fact, I'd wager). At that point much of the program's cost isn't going toward helping people pay for healthcare, which is the nominal point, but toward helping people who (evidently, as they don't need to dip into their HSA before retirement) don't need help with medical bills have an even-more-advantaged retirement, meaning program efficiency for its stated purpose would suffer significantly, with much of it being diverted to improving the retirements of the already-well-off.

That's why it's gotta be restricted in some way. Not because it isn't beneficial to have even for same-year spending for people using such programs, but because the cost of the program going toward things that are not alleviating healthcare costs would go way up, which is to say, the program's efficiency (at achieving its intended goals) per dollar it costs would drop.

[deepsun]

Well, then any insurance is also gambling, according to your argument. Mean return of buying insurance must be always worse than not buying, but you don't want it to happen to _you_.

PS: except for home insurance in hurricane areas, government allows insurance plans to be non-actuarial, so essentially all other taxpayers pay for destroyed homes there. Gov even promotes rebuilding destroyed homes in the same place, instead of people moving out, only exacerbating the problem. Whether it's good or bad I don't know.

[carlosjobim]

> Well, then any insurance is also gambling, according to your argument.

That's what they are. Three big industries are net-losses to the economy by definition: banking, insurance and gambling.

[dheera]

> Well, then any insurance is also gambling

It literally is. You're buying a YES token on a black swan event that pays you if that event happens. The entire American system is built on gambling, and that's my point.

If you want, and you're good at math, you can even buy such insurance from Kalshi. Hell, if you're worried about an alien attack, you can buy insurance against that on Kalshi by buying the $0.05 YES for that. If aliens attack and mess us all up, you get a payout of $1. You can insure yourself against politics, against a market crash, against war, lots of other things. See my point? Insurance IS gambling.

BTW, there are other countries where healthcare is almost free and you don't need to buy insurance.

[nradov]

But will those other countries protect you from an alien attack for free?

[ar_lan]

> If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year.

Conflating this with gambling is dishonest. I'll grant you that I've always viewed the way FSA is structured is weird, but this is absolutely not gambling unless you're completely unaware.

If you have any regular, annual medical expenses that are out of pocket, or plan to purchase any of the very wide variety of items that are eligible for FSA (e.g. gym equipment, many foods, glasses, contacts, etc. that might not be fully covered), then you can estimate this with exceptional accuracy.

This is not the same as playing roulette.

[dheera]

The non-gambling way of doing this would be to just tax deduct all of that stuff at tax time based on what you ACTUALLY spend.

Being forced to plan it and "lose it if you don't spend it" IS gambling, in my book.

[abirch]

This has an outsized impact on young men.

[pacman1337]

Adults should have the freedom to gamble if they feel like gambling. I don't like the government trying to daddy me. If I want to blow my money on some stupid bet that is my problem. As long as the rules are clear and fair then it should absolutely be legal. CNN not disclosing is bad, but that has nothing to do with gambling in general.

[anduril22]

It's both a key driver and symptom of societal disintegration and ultimate downfall.

[nlarew]

You are 100% free to not gamble

[baggachipz]

And I don't, save for a Super Bowl square or fantasy football entry fees. My point is that it's doing real damage to the most vulnerable and acting like it's some flippant choice is both myopic and selfish.

[lenerdenator]

> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

You severely punish those involved with prison time for whatever you can find on them. And I'm not talking a few months at Club Fed.

[tangenter]

I try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.

[el_io]

Ublock Origin Lite is quite capable.

[nradov]

It probably depends on the algorithm. I never see gambling ads on YouTube.

[embedding-shape]

Also country. Visited Sweden recently, gambling ads everyone on the internet, on TV and in public spaces, but back home Spain I still see some, but nowhere near the level as it was in Sweden.

[throw0101a]

> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

Why don't we just let The Market™ decide? /s

[deaton]

Its just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time.

On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.

[DeluluDon]

It's really terrible. Gambling addiction is a serious issue that needs to be educated towards people first before any 'Kalshi' mention.

I suppose that's what those 'Gambling problem?'ads are for.

Well we don't need ads. We need responsible education against the effects of gambling addiction or we need to raise wages, which is it?

[miltonlost]

Or we could also ban sports betting apps and Kalshi and Polymarket.

Where does raising wages have to deal with this?

[JumpinJack_Cash]

> > The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).

It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.

Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.

If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming