You Can’t Win if You Don’t Play

A Lottery is a Taxation,
Upon all the Fools in Creation;
And Heav’n be prais’d,
It is easily rais’d,
Credulity’s always in Fashion;
For, Folly’s a Fund,
Will never lose Ground;
While Fools are so rife in the Nation
– Henry Fielding, 1732

There is a legend about a devout Christian man who prayed to the Lord to let him win the lottery. His prayer continued through years of blue collar labor until the man grew old and weary. Finally, on his death bed, after decades of praying to win the lotto, the man cries out “Lord, I’ve been your humble servant my entire life and I’ve only ever asked you for one thing, why have you forsaken me.” Suddenly, a blinding light shines down from the heavens, God sighs and says in a thundering voice “you know, you could buy a ticket!”

I will freely admit that I have played the lotto a few times. This was caused by an irrational belief in fate, not an irrational belief that playing the lottery is a good idea. I played the long odds that I was meant to win the lottery. It wasn’t in the stars.

Lotteries can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (~200 B.C.). While it may seem like the government recently stole the whole concept of the lottery from organized crime, a lottery actually helped fund the American Revolution.

Many critics call the lottery a “regressive tax” because a disproportionate amount of the revenue generated comes from the poor. It’s funnier, and probably even more true, to call it a “stupid tax.” If you must gamble, you’d have to look hard to find worse odds. Of course it isn’t a tax at all – playing the lottery is voluntary. I would call the lottery a failure of government to justify its policy prerogatives.

A lottery is a mechanism for raising revenue without directly raising taxes. In some states, a lottery provides a mechanism to support programs that the public couldn’t otherwise be convinced to support. In others, it’s a shell game. Lotteries are used to fund programs with broad public support so the funds that should be supporting those programs can be shifted to projects that are not public priorities. The latter is the case in Illinois.

In Illinois our schools are our justification for our lottery. Because the wealthy and the powerful want their kids to learn in palaces, we fund our schools at the local level through property taxes so they can keep revenues local.

Instead of honoring the Illinois Constitution which says the state has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education, we insist on keeping the funding local. Instead of insisting that students across Illinois have a roughly equal educational experience, the powerful are protected and the poor are given lottery based school funding. The result: Illinois has one of the nation’s largest gaps, in both funding and achievement, between rich and poor public schools.
Governor Blagojevich, looking for another short term fix that will pass our states fiscal problems on to future administrations, wants desperately to sell or lease the Illinois lottery system for a short term pool of cash to balance the budget. This will lead to a smaller percentage of revenues going to fund state programs and likely an overall expansion of Illinois lottery operations. While this could fill a short term budget hole, the policy is a disaster, and a poor substitute for either further cutting spending or modestly increasing taxes.

If I were dictator of the world, I would abolish the lottery. Instead, I’ll make one modest reform proposal. If you take a short drive across Champaign to the other side of Bradley, and interview those who buy lotto tickets $20 at a time, you would likely find many welfare recipients in that $20 dollar club. I’ve met more than a few in my own blue-collar central Illinois town. It is particularly troubling when public funds are gambled/recommitted into lottery system. While I generally oppose tracking technology, I propose creating a state lottery registration card. Everyone who wants to play the Illinois lottery could be issued a card, and those receiving public benefits like food stamps, welfare, or social security disability payments, would have a cap on the amount per month they are permitted to spend on lottery tickets. This could also help curtail counterfeiting and ticket theft. I realize some will likely argue it is protecting people from themselves, but it’s also protecting public funds.

I look forward to your thoughts on this proposal.