Written by Noah Darnell
At long last, lottery tickets have gone on sale at more than 1,550 Arkansas locations this week. Regardless of whatever your moral urge might be, I find it absolutely fascinating. In my mind there are very few topics more fascinating than watching a society’s reaction to such an issue. Is the benefit to education enough to justify the claim that a state-sponsored lottery is simply a tax on people who mistakenly think they can “win it big” and rescue themselves from poverty?
If you’re not aware, the first tickets went on sale at midnight Sept. 28 and are of the scratch-off variety with prizes ranging from $2 to $100,000 with odds in the 1:880,000 for the $100,000. Not great odds, but better for the cheaper tickets, right? Wrong. There is only a 1:788,571 for a maximum $3,000 on the $1 ticket. The best odds weigh in at 1:632,727 on the $2 ticket but that’s pretty astronomically low.
Yet people still play. And play. And play. And the numbers are shocking. A number of news Websites, some place the “average” lottery player spending upwards of $50 per week. That doesn’t even account for the throngs of people like Robert Forbes who told the Associated Press he drives hours every day to Texarkana to spend an average of $75 on lottery tickets. Or a woman (whom I will leave nameless) in the same AP article who claims she drives to the same Texarkana gas station three or four times a week to spend $80 or $90 per trip. The irony of her situation runs as deep as her drive from Hope, Ark., is long: she’s unemployed and on disability from her chicken processing plant job.
Do I really need to unleash a diatribe on the absurdity of these sorts of stories? I don’t mean to be too heartless, but do these people not understand the concept of an Idiot Tax? Is it too harsh to almost see a pretty excellent example of good ol’ social Darwinism at work? It seems to me that the same people who are swarming to the gas stations by the droves to buy the first scratch-off lottery tickets this week are the people who can barely afford them in the first place.
Is there any hard data to support my claims, or am I just speaking from my experience getting gas at the Conoco station this morning? Actually, Carnegie Mellon University did a study to this effect. In the same study which found that a paltry 53 cents to each dollar spent on lottery tickets are actually ever returned as winnings, they released that almost three times as many tickets were bought by people in a low-income (less than $10,000 per year) situation than people in a middle-income (between $35-55,000) situation – and almost five times more than people in high-income (over $100,000) situations buy. The primary author of the study claims “the hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape.”
So, any Arkansan can go to almost any gas station or tobacco shop in the state and see for him or herself what Carnegie Mellon University has been claiming for more than a year. Effectively, the lowest income bracket in the United States pays for – at almost three times as much – the government scholarships these lotteries are designed to support.
There are huge populations of people who are up in arms fighting the installation of state-sponsored lotteries across the country. These people argue the lottery is wrong for a multitude of reasons, ranging from it being morally wrong to being a ploy by a liberal government to rule the world. I say it’s a program that lawmakers in 43 states – red and blue alike – have signed into law, and it’s all because it truly and unequivocally works! People who cannot afford to feed their kids are buying lottery tickets.
They’re going out of their way, driving hours and hours per day to get across state lines and funneling, literally, billions of dollars into Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma educational systems. It is an absolute proven fact that the highest-grossing sellers of lottery tickets in all five lottery-ticket selling states surrounding Arkansas are the gas stations immediately across the state line.
So what? My answer is two fold. First, I don’t complain about the Arkansas lottery because I say, if they’re going to be buying lottery tickets anyway, let’s at least keep the money in the state. And, second, if anyone really wants to fight the lottery, go out and persuade people to stop buying lottery tickets with their disability checks and feed their kids!
But who am I to complain? I have innumerable friends and family in Georgia and Tennessee with lucrative college degrees right now as paid for by your friendly, neighborhood Idiot Tax. Good luck, Arkansas.
