|
It is not a good thing when a government promotes its citizens'
irresponsible behavior. People will behave badly enough without governmental encouragement.
A state-sponsored
lottery is a bad policy. Not only is a lottery a tax on the mathematically challenged, it is also a rational decision
to hurt our most vulnerable citizens. I think it is immoral.
Lottery players with incomes under $10,000 spend
almost three times as much money on lotteries as a percentage of their income as those with incomes over $50,000.
"The introduction of a state lottery is associated with an average decline of $46 per month, or 2.4%, in household
non-gambling expenditures." (Journal of Public Economics, M.S. Kearney, 2005) In low-income families, that's
$46 that doesn't go to food, kids' clothes and school supplies. Sometimes rent or utilities.
Lotteries
encourage the people who can least afford it to think magically instead of responsibly. "If I could only win the
lottery, all my problems would go away." But magic thinking doesn't make problems go away. And spending
money on a lottery will only make money problems worse.
The odds of winning a state-supported lottery are in the
neighborhood of 1-in-14 million. I can't do the math, but someone who can tells me that the expected value of $1
placed in a lottery with only 1 million-to-1 odds is .000001, or one ten-thousandth of a cent. Multiply that by 14.
Or imagine 14 million numbers in front of you. Pick a number. Any number. Put some money on it. You
think you might win? No! Why would a government want to encourage people to invest in something so unlikely?
Sure, its a harmless diversion for wealthy people like me. But it's a potentially addictive trap for a few and a
waste of precious, limited resources for so many others.
We already fund Arkansas disproportionately on the backs
of the poor. We have a regressive state tax formula as it is. In Arkansas, low and middle income citizens pay
state and local government 12 cents of every dollar they make, while our wealthy richest 1% pay only 6 cents per dollar.
That's because we fund state government too much with sales tax and not enough with income tax. A lottery targets
lower wage earners who are already paying a larger portion of their modest income to the state.
But the lottery
proceeds would go to scholarships, they tell us. Not quite. Seventy percent of the lottery proceeds go to administration,
advertising, promotion and prizes. Only thirty cents of a lottery dollar goes to scholarships. And if our state
is like other Southern states that use lottery money for college scholarships, we'll find the lottery doesn't increase
enrollments, but instead, the money helps subsidize people who would have gone to college anyway.
Research
shows that lotteries are played disproportionately by people with lower levels of education. The uneducated and poor,
who have reduced possibilities for advancement, are funding scholarships for the privileged and for those with enhanced possibilities
for advancement. That's reverse Robin Hood economics. In relative terms, we're taking from the poor to
give to the rich.
Since state-sponsored lottery income has proven to be unstable, not tracking economic trends,
state budget makers can't safely predict future income from their lotteries. When lottery sales go down, many states
boost their promotion, buying more ads to encourage their citizens' irresponsible behavior. Not good.
There's
something ethically stinky about encouraging "something for nothing" thinking. We should be teaching our young
people the traditional American values of industry, honesty, hard work and responsibility. A state-promoted lottery
undermines those values.
|
