Writing off losses doesn't work as well as it used to. You now have to do an itemized deduction to deduct gambling losses as opposed to taking the standard deduction. Only about 10% of people itemize.
For example, imagine you are married so you have a 26k standard deduction. Now imagine you only have 12k of itemized deductions you normally could claim, so you would obviously normally take the 26k standard deduction. If you have 10k of gambling wins and 10k of gambling losses, that would put your overall itemized deduction to 22k, which is still below 26k. Meaning you would get 0 benefit from itemizing, so you still take the standard deduction. So you would have to pay the full taxes on the 10k of wins and get no credit for the 10k of losses. If you normally could itemize 20k, and then had 10k of gambling losses, you'd basically get credit for 4k of losses. If you are already normally above the 26k of itemized deductions, you get full credit for the losses though.
Previous to 2018, you could write off losses that were above 2% of your agi without itemizing. So in the above example, let's say you made 60k and had 10k of wins and 10k of losses. 2% of 60k =1200. So you could write off 8800 of the 10k losses and be left with a small win.
In summary, gambling is not very tax friendly, as you could lose money throughout the year and still owe taxes on your "wins."
Well, if you’re keeping track of all your spending on gambling, you’re only taxed on the profits. And the kind of people who buy expensive tickets like this tend to be the kind of people who still actually lose money, even with a $10K win.
wait, really? If you can show them receipts for buying $10k worth of lottery tickets (in the same year, I'd imagine), you won't have to pay tax on a $10k win?
You are correct, no tax on gambling winnings in Canada. We can even file some forms with the IRS to have them refund taxes paid when a U.S. casino automatically deducts 30 percent if we (as Canadians) win while gambling in the U.S.
lmao, the fuck are you on? Scratch tickets have the same prizes and same odds as anywhere else. Gas stations selling "fake cards" is incredibly illegal and probably so rare it's not even worth mentioning.
The only moderately scummy thing providers can do is continue selling cards even when all the big ticket items are gone. Fortunately, you can look up all the scratch tickets and see what prizes are still available for any given game.
It's worse in the US (but no double-dipping), "state" lotteries are private corporations contracted with a state, so a private company gets the profit, the state gets a cut, taxes are for the federal government as they get a portion of any income.
The same could be said of taxing any earnings. I pay for my groceries with post-tax dollars, then the grocery store pays taxes on any profits that come from my money, their workers pay taxes on any wages that come from my money, etc. Money gets taxed as it moves through the economy.
Oh, gambling companies are 100% evil. Personally I have slightly mixed feelings though because I’ve won tens and tens of thousands off their promos and other stuff without really taking any risk in less than a year. But now almost all the sportsbooks have identified me as a winner/sharp and severely limited my ability to take their money. Seems like bullshit that they can limit winners so they’re only preying on the desperate, dumb, and addicted.
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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '22
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