Thursday is Thanksgiving, when you will likely gather with
friends and loved ones around a prodigious pile of food that would
feed a sub-Saharan family of 27 for a fortnight, and, between
forkfuls of stuffing, reflect on all in this world for which you
are thankful.
Seven Kaiser Permanente employees in Anaheim have quite a lot to
be thankful for: the $315 million they won in the Mega Millions
lottery jackpot last week (the third-highest single-ticket lottery
payout ever). Lottery officials in states all over the country are
giving thanks as well; it’s those tantalizing,
much-publicized payouts that keep the millions of other players of
state and interstate lotteries plunking down paychecks for the Pick
Six.
In a state with such severe budget problems as California, the
lottery may seem like a great way for the state to make money. It
may seem even better because most states make a big deal out of
earmarking the money they make from the lottery for education. But
to dismiss state lotteries as unimportant or even beneficial
overlooks the economic realities at play, and ignores the blatant
governmental and media hypocrisy involved.
The media’s boilerplate tale of lottery success is
familiar. Josephine Singlemom, who works 11 jobs to support her
family, buys a lotto ticket every day. One day, she wins! She uses
the money to buy a controlling share of the company she works for
so she can fire the boss who used to make her work on Christmas!
She can send all her children to Harvard!
These semi-regular stories make it seem like the lottery is a
reasonable way for a person to crawl out of poverty or to be
vaulted into the ranks of the multimillionaires ““ after all,
you just have to pick the right numbers. Except for one thing: the
odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 176,000,000-to-1,
according to the Mega Millions Web site. Not only, as the cliche
goes, are you more likely to get struck by lightning, but according
to the National Safety Council, you are 600 times more likely to
die from “ignition or melting of nightwear.” By
comparison, this makes it seem like the Hard Rock and the Mirage
casinos are giving away free money at their roulette tables.
But shouldn’t we overlook such horrendous odds if, as the
Mega Millions Web site claims, 34 cents of every dollar spent on
the lottery goes into public education?
Well, no. The 1999 National Gambling Impact Study Commission
Final Report found that lotteries generate anywhere from .41
percent to 4.07 percent of the revenue of the states that run them,
so the amount of money’s not enormous to begin with. And the
money comes from the wrong people: Studies have shown that people
in the lowest income brackets spend eight times more on the lottery
than those in the highest. The NGISC says state governments have
become “dependent” on lottery revenue in this
“anti-tax era.” Basically, it’s easier to get
that 1-4 percent of state revenue from poor people buying lottery
tickets than it is to tax corporations or the wealthy.
Plus, this is gambling ““ we’re not talking about the
cleanest of rackets. Recently withdrawn Supreme Court nominee
Harriet Miers was embroiled in a scandal that embodied the sort of
corruption that has plagued state lotteries when she was the
chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission. The Rhode Island gambling
company GTECH was awarded a multi-million dollar contract to run
Texas’ state lottery amid swirling reports of kickbacks from
GTECH to prominent Texas officials.
Such scandals involving state lotteries have been commonplace
since these lotteries started to become big business in the 1970s
and 1980s. State governments outside of Nevada don’t want
privately owned casinos, save for a few on Indian reservations, and
they tax those that do exist. The media castigates public figures
if they find out those individuals have gambling problems. And yet
both state governments and the media are fine with a lottery system
that has a history of corruption and offers odds of winning that
are ludicrously low compared to any casino.
There is nothing wrong with allowing people to gamble. People
can do what they want with their money. But severely curtailing the
existence of private casinos while advertising state-run,
monopolistic lotteries on the nightly news is hypocrisy. Either
shut down state lotteries that use frequent “Next at 11, a
single mother who won six trillion dollars in the Powerball!”
stories to get lower-income people to keep buying tickets, or relax
the regulations that curtail all other forms of gambling in this
country.
One thing I would be very thankful for this holiday season,
though ““ if those seven workers in Anaheim kicked some of
their $315 million my way. Otherwise I might be forced to start
playing the Powerball just to pay for these ridiculous fee
increases.
James Lipton has declared this column
“scrumtrulescent.” Do you agree? E-mail Atherton at
datherton@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.