Kentucky Lawmakers Place Their Bets on Sports Betting

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Sports betting in the United States has been a hotly debated issue for a very long time but since the landmark Supreme Court ruling of May 2018, things have changed for the better with the states being allowed to decide on whether they prefer to have sports betting industries or not. For a number of states, sports betting was championed as a means of complementing tax revenues but for some others, the industry may just be a solution to a number of financial troubles they may have gotten into.

Kentucky is one of the states that may have been compelled to look into sports betting further with the state’s lawmakers hoping that the industry might get them out of a fix. The state has quite a big problem with public employee pension systems which is considered to be one of the worst-funded retirement plans in the United States. In fact, with about $39 billion in the red, it has presented a huge hurdle in the state and for a very long time, there seemed to be little to no hope primarily because even the lawmakers were admittedly vexed by the situation.

A Viable Solution?

The rapid rise of legal sports betting in the country has opened a ton of opportunities for gamblers, operators and even the states themselves. As such, a section of lawmakers in Kentucky believe that they may have found a potential fix for the state’s big pension scheme problem.

A number of bills have been introduced since the beginning of the year with most of them outlining and detailing plans to have some, or a majority, of the tax revenue from the proposed sports betting industry channeled towards filling the gap in its poorly-funded pension scheme. According to Rep. Adam Koenig, one of the lawmakers whose sports betting bill has passed a key committee, while it is unlikely that the sports betting industry will single-handedly eliminate the problem, it will have a significant in boosting funding for that purpose.

Many other lawmakers are very eager to usher in a new era of legal and regulated sports betting that will allow the state to tap into the rather modest tax revenue that has been going to the drain for a very long time due to illegal or underground operations. A recent analysis of the state’s market and some of the proposed bills revealed that tax revenue that could be obtained from legal sports betting will be as high as $20 million annually – the tax rate, in that case, will stand somewhere between 10.25 and 14.25 percent of the total revenue collected by sportsbooks.

SSandra loves new tech. That’s why when iGaming was first floated as an idea, she decided to gobble up every bit of information about the industry. Years of reading and committing knowledge to paper have transformed Sandra in a true tech wonk. She is able to navigate both the legal and business context of the industry, turning data and serious information into pleasant and easy to read articles.