A State Lottery: Points to Ponder
- Lottery gambling harms education.
States that direct lottery proceeds to education spend less on education than do states without lotteries. In fact, many states actually decrease the percentage of their state budget spent on education after they pass a lottery, and find it hard to fund basic education programs through the legislative process and education bond referendums. Voters start believing "the lottery will take care of education."
"Lotteries are false promises for education. In fact, states are likely to decrease their rate of spending for education upon operating lotteries designed for that purpose...Regardless of when and where the lottery operated, education spending declined once the state put a lottery into effect...(our) study indicates that states without lotteries actually maintained and increased their education spending more so than states with lotteries."
Donald Miller & Patrick Pierce, "Lotteries for Education: Windfall or Hoax?" State and Local Government Review, Winter 1997, p. 40-41.
"The estimated $41 million that the newly approved multistate lottery will generate won't help Ohio schools. Although the money officially will be designated for education — as required by a constitutional amendment passed by Ohio voters in 1987 — an equal amount will be removed from the schools' existing allocation. Thus, the state's general revenue fund will wind up with the additional money, helping to balance the budget. The schools won't get a penny more.
Critics said the maneuver, contained in 13 lines buried in the budget-fixing bill approved yesterday by the legislature, will fuel public skepticism about whether Ohio schools really get all lottery profits. "All those times we're back home saying all the lottery money goes to education — we aren't going to be able to say that anymore,'' said Rep. Chris Redfern, D-Port Clinton. "This is not a moral or ethical question for me — it's hypocrisy.''
For years, state officials have been accused of playing a shell game with lottery money. Although they might meet the letter of the law by spending all lottery profits on schools, they violate its spirit by reducing the state allocation to schools from nonlottery money, critics have said.
"New lottery profits won't go to schools," Columbus Dispatch, December 6, 2001
- Lottery gambling is predatory — those who can afford it least spend the most.
Lottery companies know that poor households spend 3 times as much on lottery tickets as middle-income households. That is why they use millions of your tax dollars to target poor neighborhoods with seductive lottery advertising. People with household incomes of less than $10,000 bet nearly three times as much on lotteries as those with incomes over $50,000, according to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. The top 5 percent of players (who played $3,870 or more) accounted for 54 percent of total lottery sales; the top 20 percent of players accounted for 82 percent of sales.
National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), p. xxiii; "State Lotteries at the Turn of the Century: Report to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission," Charles T. Clotfelter, Philip J. Cook, Julie A. Edell and Marian Moore, Duke University, April 23, 1999, p. 12.
- Lottery gambling increases crime.
On average, states that pass a lottery experience a 3% increase in crime. That's about 5,000 more households victimized by crime every year.
John Mikesell and Maureen A. Pirog-Good, "State Lotteries and Crime: The regressive revenue producer is linked with a crime rate higher by 3 percent," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, January 1990, as cited by Sandeep Managalmurti and Robert Cook, p. 13.
- Lottery gambling harms children.
Lottery advertising targets children with a destructive message that replaces the value of hard work with a message that "Easy Street" is just a lottery ticket away. Several years ago, a lottery billboard went up on a street in a low-income neighborhood in Chicago that read, "How to get from Washington Street to Easy Street — Play the Illinois Lottery." A lottery advertisement in New York showed a mother teasing a daughter for studying for a scholarship. After all, Mom had already bought a lottery ticket to solve their financial problems.
"General Assembly to grapple with issue of lottery advertising," The Sun News, (Myrtle Beach, SC) Monday, December 18, 2000; Neal Peirce, "Lotteries are getting serious and crazy," The Plain Dealer [Cleveland, Ohio], May 9, 1989.
In 1997, researchers at Louisiana State University — Shreveport surveyed 12,066 Louisiana students in grades six through 12. They found that 86 percent had gambled, many by age 13, making experimentation with gambling more common than drug or alcohol use. Two-thirds — 66 percent — indicated they had gambled on scratch-off lottery tickets, and about 32 percent had played Lotto. The survey also found that 10 percent of the state's students are problem gamblers, and another 5.7 percent have been identified as pathological gamblers.
James R. Westphal, Jill A. Rush, Lee Stevens, Ron Horswell, and Lera Joyce Johnson, "Statewide baseline survey: Pathological gambling and substance abuse-Louisiana students, 6th through 12th grades," (Louisiana State University Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, April 27, 1998).
- Lottery gambling harms local economies, retail business.
Hampton Roads, VA study showed a loss of $430 million in retail sales over 3 years after the lottery was approved in Virginia.
"Lottery sales hurting retailers, planners say," Virginian-Pilot, December 13, 1991.
- Lottery gambling does not make good sense.
Lotteries offer the worst odds of any form of gambling. The odds for winning the average lottery are 1 in 14,000,000. In other words, you have the same odds of being struck by lightning 7 times as you do of winning the average lottery.
Sandeep Mangalmurti and Robert Cooke, "An Oklahoma State Lottery: Seducing the less Fortunate?," Resource Institute of Oklahoma, April 1994
- Lottery gambling teaches our children the wrong values.
Would state educators want to put the principles underlying the lottery in a middle school textbook? How can we on one hand use State money to teach character education — and on the other hand, use millions of dollars in State money to promote a lottery that targets poor people, takes advantage of problem gamblers and devastates many North Carolina families?
- A Lottery referendum is unconstitutional in North Carolina
"The constitution will allow some questions, such as the issuance of bonds or constitutional amendments, to be put to a vote of the people. But it doesn't allow a referendum on a simple law like one creating a lottery, [constitutional expert John Sanders] said." Winston-Salem Journal, 4/15/02
