A House panel chaired by Rep. Mary Bono Mack talked enthusiastically Tuesday about the legalization of interstate Internet gambling, including popular online poker games, as way to find new federal tax revenue.
“To stand in the way of the Internet can create consequences that are impossible to recover from,” Bono Mack, R-Palm Springs, said after a hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
She cited the potential loss of jobs and tax revenue if the federal government ignores the broad appeal of online gambling, which is now mostly operated offshore. Bono Mack added that Internet gambling can be effectively regulated, and that social problems related to gambling, such as addiction, bankruptcies and exploitation of underage players, can be minimized.
But among those who see a threat in Internet gambling are the Indian tribes that operate casinos generating $26 billion annually. Ernest Stevens Jr., chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association and a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, testified that tribes see online gambling as potentially undermining the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which authorized tribal gambling.
“Tribes are concerned that legalized Internet gaming will threaten their gains,” Stevens said. The question of effective regulation hovered over the testimony of a half-dozen witnesses Tuesday, as several stressed there is nothing now to keep Americans from going online and gambling on offshore websites.
Not only does the government not get to tax money spent on offshore sites, they stressed, but those sites expose U.S. players to being cheated and exploited. Americans wager an estimated $16 billion a year on Internet poker alone.
“It endangers those who want to participate in an honest, legitimate game,” said former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, a group lobbying for online poker.
Subcommittee member Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said poker was the “All-American game,” one of skill enjoyed by many former presidents, as well as the current one, Barack Obama.