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  • From: "Common Sense Foundation" <david@common-sense.org>
  • To: <common-sense@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Consider This: Lottery Rehash
  • Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 18:01:52 -0500

Title: Lottery Rehash

The COMMON SENSE Foundation

Consider This…

LOTTERY REHASH

With Gov. Mike Easley enjoying the reverberations of his resounding re-election win earlier this month, the word on the street has it that the governors office will redouble its efforts to pass a state-run lottery in North Carolina.

Not much has changed since the last time this was proposed, except that Tennessee and South Carolina have relatively new state lotteries. North Carolina is now completely surrounded by lottery states, and all the other non-lottery holdouts are west of here.

The data from Tennessee and South Carolina is still inconclusive, but a quick look at states that have had lotteries for a while shows why state-run lotteries are bad public policy.

Getting the state into the new business of encouraging its residents to make bad economic decisions (through advertisements imploring them to buy lottery tickets) is shamefully contradictory to everything that government ought to be about.

Lottery revenue is rarely reliable and is often used to replace (rather than supplement) other sources of revenue.

Lotteries generally have a reverse-Robin-Hood effect, taking money from the poor (who are statistically more likely to buy lottery tickets) and giving it to the wealthy (who derive the lions share of benefits from the lottery-supported HOPE Scholarship program in Georgia, for example).

Most lottery opponents will tell you that a lottery is a bad bet or a bad gamble and congratulate themselves on their cleverness. But its more than that: its a stone-cold lock as bad public policy.

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  • Consider This: Lottery Rehash, Common Sense Foundation, 11/30/2004

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