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Investment activity creates wealth and jobs, while betting may actually impose costs on society.
At a recent poker game, I sat across from a young man who said he played professionally online. He lost and left early, but not before telling the table how angry he was about a tax increase Congress approved last summer: Going forward, he could write off only 90% of his losses. He got even angrier when I told him this was one of those rare taxes I agreed with.
As he saw it, this was unfair. People can write off all of their business losses, or all of their losses in the stock market, so why shouldn’t he be able to write off all of his poker losses? Until this tax provision became law as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, he was allowed to.
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Larry Washburn/Getty Images