When you start a debate, by preceding it by stating a dogma: gambling is “another decisive sector of the national economy”. In short, those who called the “General States” of Monopolies, which open today in Rome at their headquarters, peremptorily state that slot machines, lotteries and betting (a “decisive” sector) increase the wealth of the country and push for Italy’s competitiveness on the European and world stage.
With all due respect to “school” economists who, balancing (let’s stick to the purely monetary question) revenues and costs, instead conclude that the balance has a “minus” sign. Less consumption of goods and services, less tax revenues, less employment, less economic development. From the family budget, between 850 and 900 billion, you remove a slice of 21 (sum of gambling losses) and you explain why so many shops that sell manufacturing products or services for everyday needs close.
That the gambling system has a depressive effect also on the Gross Domestic Product, that is, that it acts as a “negative multiplier” of the economy, is demonstrated by scholars of the free market and ultra-free market countries (Courtwright, Adams, Orford, Hakim, Grinols and many others, from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia). And also on taxation, this system of toxic consumption produces losses, and very significant ones. In free market North America, the Tax Policy Center in Washington documents missed collections with a thoroughness that our state financial administration would do well to emulate. The “without taxes”, or vice taxes, are “The dark future of state taxation”.
We also have a very clear response in Italy. Data in hand, on the year 2023. Our fellow citizens have bet around 148 billion euros, and have lost 20.7 of them. The State earned 10.47 (always billions) and private companies had an almost equal margin (10.2). Same numbers as in 2017, before the big leap, but by as much as 50 percentage points, in the race for industrialized fortune.
And here is the elementary conclusion: to maintain the same level of revenue (for the State) and profits (for private companies) it is necessary to enlist as many people as possible in a daily life interpolated by gambling. So that the share of gambling addicts also increases: because these are the core business of the system. 80 percent of the margin comes from the 20 percent of regular consumers of one or more of the 51 gambling methods “on the market”. From this subset of regular and methodical bettors, the area of players actually suffering from gambling pathologies can be identified: they were around 1.5 million in 2018 (epidemiological survey by the Higher Institute of Health) and have increased in proportion with the gallop over the years subsequent ones.
As for young people, the analyzes converge. We are obviously referring to research carried out in the public interest, by the Ministry of Health (ISS), by the National Research Council, by healthcare companies: among the children of Generation Zeta we have 29.2 percent of young people who declare they have gambled; percentage that rises to 44.2 among pupils in the last classes of secondary schools, with a balance, in absolute numbers, between seven hundred thousand and one million people. There are over 70 thousand with a “problem gambler” profile. And this is a population where, strictly speaking, the data should be “zero”, since access is prohibited by law.
The repeal and deferral of important provisions of regional laws are also strengthening the recovery of slot machines in bars, as in the case of the provinces of Piedmont. There, between 2020 and 2024 the devices returned to as many as 1,200 public establishments (bars, hotels, supermarkets, etc.) where they had been turned off by the regulations in force since the beginning of 2018. Everyone is free, and so are the most remote ones. mountain resorts have started hearing the B-flat and E-flat notes of slot machine sounds again.
But the most striking feature of the resistible rise of industrial gambling is that of the online, or “remote”, forms. Behind the numbers monsters (82 billion and 552 million euros staked) there is mass enlistment among the population, including a very significant portion of the elderly population. Between 2018 and 2023, therefore passing through the two-year period of Covid, the number of people who have an online gambling account increased by over 42 percentage points. From around 5 million we reached 7 million and 65 thousand. The acquisition of customers among the elderly is notable: +128 percent, involving 121 thousand people over 75, another 865 thousand between 65 and seventy-four year olds. There are one million and 200 thousand young adults (those aged between 18 and 24) who have one or more online gambling accounts in operation.
With these dimensions of the phenomenon, does it make any sense (other than manipulation) to evoke the specter of prohibitionism? What is the point, therefore, in these “General States of public gaming” (gambling) “to discuss the effectiveness of prohibitionist policies and prohibition”? the dilemma, if anything, is between the right to health, art. 32 of the Constitution, and its suspension when productions that threaten it spread, such as gambling, smoking, high-calorie industrial food, alcoholism. They spread, without parliament being able to respect the hierarchy of values of the Republic, that is, health first, followed by the fiscal interest of the State and then by the strictly controlled space of the private economy which distributes cigarettes, spirits, junk food, betting , lotteries and digital roulette.
