A Nevada senator’s efforts to roll back the gambling tax addendum in the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) have hit a roadblock. Late last week, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto introduced the Facilitating Unbiased Loss Limitations to Help Our Unique Service Economy (FULL HOUSE) Act, which would restore the opportunity for gamblers to deduct losses on their taxes if their winnings exceeded those losses.
Under the new rules, gamblers can only deduct 90 percent of their losses, if their winnings exceeded that amount. It doesn’t take a lot of complicated math to figure out that this new arrangement is a terrible deal for winning gamblers. Masto, and other critics of the bill, point out that this could mean gamblers could wind up paying taxes on losses. With such an odious tax burden on winning in a regulated environment, Mastos expressed concern that the new bill would push players to the black market.
Under the terms of S 2230, the gambling tax provision would be removed from the bill via a means of fast tracking legislation known as unanimous consent. This means that the measure passes so long as no senators object to it.
Mastos pushed her effort to fellow lawmakers saying, “This ridiculous gaming tax is something we can fix today. That’s largely because this provision being included in that tax bill was a result of Republicans haphazardly inventing new budget rules to ram their debt-busting bill through Congress. These new rules they made up forced them to make changes to existing policy, even if it made that policy worse for Americans, and that’s what happened here.”
The effort to fast track the bill stalled when Mastos’ fellow lawmakers put S 2230 in a queue with other potential fixes to the bill, a queue that is long and not likely to be resolved anytime soon. So, for now, the new gambling tax remains.