Gambling ban helped by Bush administration.

[bartongrl1]

Since October of 2006, there has been an ongoing battle to stop online gambling. The reasons for wanting online gambling stopped have been moral issues, fear of young people becoming addicted, and so forth, but the bottom line is this bill having been passed messes with our constitutional rights. It invades our privacy by telling us what we can and cannot do with our own money.

Now, Rep. Spencer Bachus is getting help from the Bush administration in furthering his efforts to have banks take on the daunting task of keeping track of "our" money and where it goes.

By putting these new rules into effect now, it will make it even harder on the upcoming administration to repeal this ban once they are in office.

These new rules will go into effect in 2009 and will supposedly define the types of monetary transactions that will be covered.

This seems like a very poor time to burden banks and other financial institutions with this kind of work. The cost of putting into effect some kind of watchdog way to keep track of what consumers are doing with their money will most likely cost in the billions of dollars and with the economy being so iffy right now, how can anyone expect something like this to be done?

The online gambling community actually does a pretty decent job of keeping tabs on gambling sites that have issues. There are many places online that you can visit that have blacklisted casinos etc, and they even give you the reasons why that casino was blacklisted.

As far as taxing online gambling, there would have to be an agreement between countries to turn in all wins to the government so that they could be sure that taxes were paid on those wins. And this seems like it would be a less daunting task for officials than trying to keep track of who spends what, where.

Only time will tell if the new administration will agree with what is done now, and whether or not they will be able to repeal the law.