It’s just odd that if someone goes to a blackjack table for 5 minutes and wins four $250 hands but loses eight $250 hands that you want them to claim $1000 in income.
Is it any better that you sit down and pull out a ledger with each hand you play, write down the wins in one column then the losses in another, then add up your losses, multiply the number by 0.9, and take that final output to make sure your tax reporting is accurate?
To be clear, I wasn’t talking about micromanaging at that level. More along the lines of just what happens when you walk in and walk out of a casino….in your example. If I buy in with $1000 and I cash out with $1500, I get taxed on $500. Doesn’t matter how you get there. Gambling is entertainment….or at least it should be. Fostering a system where its anything more than that and incentivizes people to do it more often is going to create issues with people struggling on the addiction side of things. If you’re fortunate enough to win, pay whatever the legally required tax is. You lose, too bad. That’s the cost of doing business.
For reporting purposes, I think a sensible approach is that you get a consolidated statement each year from whichever and however many private entities you use as your “platform”, and your wins / losses get combined within that entity, however many bets you make. So, you can offset your taxable income with your losses within one entity, but not across the board to multiple others. Of course that will never happen, particularly with casinos, as they have always been set up on a cash based model where the transactions remain as untraceable as possible. Everyone gets their cut that way…..casino controls the intake manually, distribution of winnings have paperwork to cover their losses for their tax liability, they charge exorbitant fees to 3rd party vendors using ATM’s on their floor, and those 3rd party vendors charge even more exorbitant withdrawal fees to use those ATM’s. And the consumers get to potentially rake in tons of untraceable income.
Can’t make that type of system happen? Then simply save everybody the time and headache of even having gambling profits as taxable income (or at least below a certain income threshold), because it’s about as unenforceable as it possibly could be in the current configuration.