Outrage is my theme.

Someone recently asked me what exactly my goal was in writing a regular opinion column. The question came during a phone call with the producer of a television documentary while she was conducting a pre-interview to decide whether anything I had to say was compelling enough to appear on camera. It was an unexpected question – always the best kind – and I had an unexpectedly quick answer.

“Outrage,” I said. Specifically, moral outrage.

Even though my answer came quickly, it was true. I am free to search for stories that I think will or should outrage other Kansas residents. Then I comment, often with some original reporting mixed in with historical background. I throw in a personal anecdote or two. Sometimes I write columns about other things, like capturing a seasonal mood or sharing a literary crime novel with readers, but most of the time I am driven by outrage.

A good example of this is a new study that shows how sports betting hits the most economically vulnerable households the hardest. The study confirms what many of us instinctively feared when Kansas legalized sports betting two years ago.

“The economic impact is enormous,” the study concludes. “The share of their income that households with low savings spend on betting is about 32% greater than the amount spent by households with high savings. … Legalizing sports betting could exacerbate existing financial burdens on (low-income) households.”

The July 2024 study, conducted by a team that includes two researchers from the University of Kansas, used financial transactions from a large number of U.S. consumers to get a comprehensive picture of activity on online gambling sites. The team sought to answer three questions: Does access to legalized sports betting encourage other forms of financial risk-taking, are there measurable effects on household financial health, and do the effects vary across households with different financial or demographic characteristics?

The title of the study sums up the answer to these questions: “Squandering stability: The impact of sports betting on vulnerable households.”

In 2022, the Kansas legislature was overrun by powerful sports betting lobbyists. As the New York Times reported, our lawmakers were pampered with whiskey, cigars and other perks by the lobby, and passed a law so deferential to the gambling industry that they should have been ashamed, as Clay Wirestone, opinion editor of the Kansas Reflector, wrote last year.

The massive lobbying effort in state legislatures across the country was spurred by the Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 to overturn a near-nationwide ban on sports betting. For the previous 25 years, Nevada was the only state where sports betting was legal.

Sports betting was illegal in Kansas for about a century before Governor Laura Kelly placed the first legal bet on September 1, 2022. She placed $15 on the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl. The Chiefs went on to beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 the following February.

Since then, Kansas residents have placed about $4 billion in bets through online apps or at casinos in the state. The state sports betting tax is 10%, but actual revenue is less because introductory “free play” promotions are not taxed. Since 2022, the state has taken in about $18 million from sports betting.

Sports betting in some form is now legal in 38 states.

Curious to learn more about the new study, I contacted KU researcher Kevin Pisciotta, one of the five authors. Pisciotta and his KU colleague Justin Balthrop were quick to answer my questions. Both are assistant professors of finance at the KU School of Business.

“Sports betting is an activity in which there are very few long-term winners,” Pisciotta told me. “It’s one thing to replace a source of entertainment (like going to the movies) with sports betting, but it’s quite another to divert money from savings or investments or accumulate high-interest debt to try to ‘win’ at sports betting.”

The best general advice, says Pisciotta, is to never bet more than you can afford to lose.

The most surprising findings from the study, the couple said, were the amounts spent on sports betting (which they considered a type of high-risk investment in the study) and what they called “withdrawals from more boring, savings-focused investments.”

The study included almost all legal online sports betting in the United States from 2018 to September 2023. During this period, sports betting spread to 25 states and the District of Columbia.

According to the study, bettors were more than twice as likely as non-bettors to have invested in cryptocurrency or overdrawn their bank account. They were four times more likely to have played online poker or bought lottery tickets. Bettors from “financially constrained” households were also more likely to have higher credit card debt and pay lower monthly payments on it. The study also concluded that bettors with children made up a large portion of bettors in the sample, based on child tax credit data.

“As low-income households spend a growing share of their income on betting,” the study says, “it is important to understand the impact this has on the overall financial health of these households.”

Balthrop and Pisciotta said their findings also contradict the common belief that new sports bettors will give it a try, have some fun, but eventually lose interest.

“Our results suggest that (legalized gambling) has been quite effective in converting people into sports bettors and hooking them once they start betting,” Pisciotta and Balthrop said in a joint statement. “On the negative side, it appears that the online component, and the few frictions it introduces, plays a significant role in people’s savings and debt decisions.”

So is sports betting good for society?

“We don’t have answers on how to weigh the pros and cons,” they said, “but our findings suggest that making online betting less easy could reduce some of the negative aspects.”

Although the study concludes that sports betting does indeed represent new sources of income for the state, it also warns of the financial risks for some households and calls on politicians to do more to protect the vulnerable.

“It is imperative that policymakers consider the broader financial implications of legalizing sports betting,” the report says. “Targeted interventions, stricter regulation of gambling advertising and support for safe investment opportunities are critical to mitigating the negative impacts.”

What surprised me most when talking to Pisciotta and Balthrop was the fact that both are active sports bettors.

Pisciotta said he bets “fairly regularly,” but he always keeps the stakes low and sometimes makes emotional hedging bets. I had to look that up – it means betting against the team you like so that if they lose, you’ll at least win some money and feel better.

“I’m pretty proud to say that since I was at KU, I’ve bet against the Chiefs in all three Super Bowls they’ve won,” Pisciotta said. “I probably didn’t get my hedging ratio right because I was excited every time they won.”

Balthrop said he was one of the first to play fantasy sports for money and also participated in legalized sports betting.

“The tools and skills I bring from my quantitative studies and my early career in the hedge fund world translate well to sports betting,” he said. “I never bet illegally, but I started betting with most of the major bookmakers immediately when I lived in a jurisdiction where it is legal (Kansas).”

I have never placed a sports bet, although I have no moral objections to gambling. I play a few rounds of blackjack at the $5 tables using a simple and boring strategy, but I walk away when I start to lose. I also buy lottery tickets from the supermarket from time to time, although I know better because I know the odds.

But I worry about people who bet more than they can afford to lose, who run up credit card debt or gamble their house payments on the next game. I find the idea of ​​being able to place sports bets on your phone as easily as ordering an Uber oddly disturbing. And I worry about what sports betting is doing to us culturally now that betting has become as mainstream as the pre-game barbecue.

For a long time, gambling’s influence on sports was almost universally perceived as negative. From the Black Sox scandal in 1919 to Pete Rose’s ban from baseball in 1989, betting was not only illegal but also considered a threat to the integrity of the games. The National Football League was also staunchly anti-gambling for decades, as were college and amateur sports organizations. Then came the Supreme Court decision in 2018, and somehow the league did a complete about-face. Why was gambling a corrupting influence on sports one day and an integral part of the fan experience the next? Surely it couldn’t have been because of the sums of money suddenly put on the table through sports betting?

My moral outrage here is not directed at those who choose to gamble, or those who may feel overwhelmed by it, but at the Kansas legislators who were so easily swayed by lobbyists that they gave us a lousy bill. It’s lousy not because it allows sports betting — although I would have been OK with it if the state had never legalized it — but because the legislators had a chance to pass a bill that would use tax revenue to support something that Kansas residents really need.

The comparatively small millions in revenue that Kansas has earned from sports betting hardly go into education, the arts, the expansion of health care or the revitalization of neighborhoods.

Instead, 80 percent of it is earmarked for a fund to attract a major league sports team to Kansas. That’s part of the bait lawmakers are using to lure the Kansas City Chiefs, among others, here. That will never happen. A better way to use the incentives would be to build a stadium-sized venue for Taylor Swift and other artists.

But that is not possible because the revenue is earmarked for professional sports.

This is like taking a modest win at the slot machine and then putting it all back into the machines. It is Kansas lawmakers who need intervention. They are addicted to sports betting – or at least to the influence of the sports betting lobby – and need a clear word about how to help ordinary Kansas citizens and not add to the burdens on households that are already financially vulnerable.