the morality of the lottery, or why 4alarm is a big fat hypocrite.

Today, I read this article from the New York Times on how little revenue lotteries create in the scheme of K-12 education budgets, and how the business of running lotteries is eating increasingly into the already slim profits. In fact, the blog entry through which I read the story was titled “What has six balls and screws teachers?” These lotteries have exploded across the country – 42 states and the District of Columbia now have them. In most instances, the lotteries fund education projects of various flavors. And this is how they are sold to the electorate. “The lottery is great! It’ll pay for cute little children to learn how to read. All for freeeeee to the taxpayers!” That sort of shit. I remember this exact propaganda when Virginia passed a referendum to start a lottery when I was a kid.

But you know what, even when you discount the added cost of the social burden of gambling addiction and such, the lottery doesn’t pay for shit. The people who buy lottery tickets pay for it, and who buys lottery tickets? Poor people. So, we’re taking money from poor people to pay for education for all the residents of the state — poor and rich. Why not start taxing arthritis medication to pay for highway improvements?

Oh, apples and oranges you say, it’s a choice to buy lottery tickets. But, wait, I say. Why do the schools need the lottery money again? Because the system is broken. Who are the folks who are most likely to be in the most broken schools? Poor people.

So, we’re asking the very people who our education system didn’t teach enough about probability and economics for them to realize that their $5 a week would be better invested in the stock market or in a shoe box under their mattress to pay for education for everyone in our state. So, it is still a choice to buy a lottery ticket, but it sure as hell isn’t an informed one. And in some cases state propaganda makes it seem like buying a lottery ticket is like buying one of those little shamrocks for a dollar at the grocery store. It’s for the chiiiiiildren.

But now we see that it isn’t. The NYT article describes that the proceeds of lotteries are going to the marketing machine and bigger and bigger prizes to encourage (poor) folks to choose to buy more and more lottery tickets. For the chiiiiiiildren. And very little of that money is actually going to the kids. If the lottery were a 501 (c) 3 (a non-for-profit), Charity Navigator would have given it the worst overhead percentage rating in the history of the universe.

The Georgia lottery’s top funding priorities are universal prekindergarten and the HOPE scholarship, which sends any Georgia public high school graduate with a B average to a state college tuition-free. I rant pretty frequently in real life about how the HOPE scholarship in Georgia is patently immoral because a) it “taxes” poor people to pay for rich kids to go to college and b) it was “sold” to the electorate as a program that would increase the number of poor kids who would have the opportunity to go to college when, in fact, its true purpose was to stifle the brain drain of smart kids opting for out-of-state schools and out-of-Georgia lives (read: lots of smart college educated people in Georgia = attractive workforce in a state with pro-corporate laws).

Now, this is where the hypocrite part of me comes in: my flame goes to school for free on HOPE. I’ve never purchased a Georgia lottery ticket IN MY LIFE. Perfect case of what nearly always happens when what’s-best-for-humanity and what’s-best-for-individual conflict. And I’m even a hyper-informed consumer.

So, therein lies the question… how do we wean ourselves off of the poisoned milk of the lottery? Especially when our policy-makers are desperate to wring every last drop into the bucket, lottery customers don’t realize they are being duped and the fat cats in the big business lottery machine are laughing themselves to the bank.