It appears that gambling opposition is a requirement for conservatives. **** 'em! From today's WSJ editorial page...
<<Multi-State Lotteries Are a Bad Bet
By Ryan H. Sager, a freelance writer based in Washington.
The big Powerball jackpot came and went, so now, unless you're one of four astronomically lucky people, you haven't won the lottery. Frankly, you stood a better chance playing the crooked McDonald's Monopoly game -- at least in that one you would have gotten fries and a Coke.
Despite the dismal odds, the multi-state lottery frenzy has become a staple of American culture in recent years. Some folks, like those in Greenwich, Conn., which is mobbed by Powerball players from neighboring New York, could live without it. But many states, including New York and Maine, are thinking of getting in on the action. In fact, states across the country are increasingly ditching their lagging single-state lotteries in favor of the bigger pots and increased revenue afforded by teaming-up.
The motivation behind lottery consolidation is clear enough: Get a jackpot-fatigued public back in the game by dazzling them with federal-surplus-sized purses. The morality of encouraging people to throw away money on the worst bet in town, however, is somewhat less certain.
Americans have always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward gambling. It offends our Protestant work ethic, yet at the same time the saloon and the riverboat casino are as American as Las Vegas. So, over the past few decades we've made a deal with ourselves when it comes to the lottery. We can sin, but our filthy money will go to fund worthy causes like education.
The problem is that in this deal everyone gets the short end of the stick. While there may be four people driving around in gold-plated PT Cruisers laughing at that last statement right now, the truth about the lottery for the vast majority of people is clear. It serves as a wildly regressive tax on the poor and the ignorant while doing little, if anything, to relieve the tax burden on the rest of society.
Lottery supporters, of course, object to the idea that the games harm the poor. "You don't get $35 billion a year from poor people," said Charles Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball along with other lotteries. The massive revenues from lotteries, he said, come from all segments of society.
While he's right that participation in the lottery is roughly equal among people of different income and educational levels, it is the intensity of participation that matters -- more than half of all lottery tickets are purchased by just 5% of those who play.
Philip Cook, a professor of economics at Duke University, told the National Gambling Impact Study Commission in March 1999 that high school dropouts spent $334 a year per capita on the lottery as opposed to the $86 per capita spent by college graduates. Similarly, the lower your income, the more you spend a year on lottery tickets.
Lest there be any doubt as to who is being targeted by lotteries, one need only look at how they are marketed. Tickets are sold in gas stations and convenience stores. Slogans pitch a quick escape from the everyday grind. At least one marketing memo that surfaced in the press was revealed as advising lottery officials in Ohio to increase promotions on days that government checks were distributed.
"The state governments are addicted to that tax," says Weston Ware, chairman of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. Surprisingly, though, lotteries have little impact on the programs they were meant to benefit. Partially, that's because lottery revenues only account for a tiny sliver of state revenue. But at a more basic level it's the same shell game that state governments play with other special sources of revenue, such as the money from the tobacco settlement. When money is earmarked for one program, like education or health care, legislatures reduce general-revenue appropriations by a corresponding amount and use the money for other projects.
In fact, rather than a substitute for higher tax rates, lotteries are a sure warning sign of a state scraping for cash. A survey by Money magazine in 1996 showed that states with lotteries had raised their per capita taxes at three times the rate of non-lottery states in the first half of the 1990s.
With a slowing economy and shrinking tax revenues overall, the lottery is a tempting scheme for dollar-hungry states. Since 37 states and the District of Colombia already have lotteries, the road to higher revenues will lie in consolidation. The next states set to embark on that path are Georgia, Kentucky and Virginia, which will all scrap their state lotteries this fall to form Lotto South. It's a sound business plan -- if these states want to go on supporting their governments with the dollars of those who can least afford it.>> |
