Arkansas lottery: a bad bet

The people of my home state of Arkansas will go to the ballot box later this year to vote on whether or not to institute a statewide lottery. Currently, every state that touches Arkansas has either a statewide lottery or casino gambling or both. Though Arkansas does have gambling at its horse track and dog track (in Hot Springs and West Memphis, respectively), it has so far resisted the temptation to expand gambling into a statewide business.

I've always been proud of that.

But those who would profit from gambling force Arkansans to say 'no' again and again, because they are so determined to foist widespread gambling upon the state. As a current North Carolina resident, I am ineligible to vote against the lottery this time around. But that can't stop me from advocating against it. I stand behind people here in the gas station and grocery store all the time here in North Carolina who are spending large amounts of money on lottery tickets. They are almost uniformly poor, and they are putting their hope for a better tomorrow in the little scratch-off cards and Powerball tickets that make them even poorer, $1 at a time.

As I have sent e-mails to friends and family back home to encourage them to vote against the lottery, several have asked me to provide more information. To that end, I am dedicating this post to the anti-lottery cause.

Check out this website of the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. It will give you a lot of good information about the proposed lottery measure, including a downloadable newsletter, "Gambling on our Future: Why a State-Sponsored Lottery is Still a Bad Bet for Education & Families in Arkansas," detailing the negative societal effects that the lottery will have (and debunking the overly-optimistic projections about state revenue from the lottery proponents).

The AACF offers these reasons why we should say 'no' to the lottery:

-- Lotteries function as regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt the economic security of low-income families.

-- If the state had a lottery, it would only get to keep 30 percent of the revenue from ticket sales. The rest would go toward prizes, advertising, and administration.

-- Lotteries are unstable sources of tax revenue that can decline from year to year. Overall, any positive effect on state budgets tend to fade over time.

-- Lotteries and other forms of gambling often lead to negative social and economic consequences for children and theri families - costs which often must be borne by the state.

-- Researchers have found that Georgia's "Hope Scholarship" lottery, often cited as a model for lotteries in other states, is disproportionately funded by low-income households, while higher-income, more-educated households disproportionately benefit from the scholarships.

-- A lottery would do little to improve access to higher education among the lowest-income citizens and would prey upon those who stand to lose the most from state-sponsored gambling.

-- If increasing access to higher education is indeed important to Arkansas' future economic success, then the state should commit to finding a stable, reliable and fair source of funding for it.

I would also strongly encourage you to read this remarkable op-ed article by Edward Ugel that appeared in the New York Times last year. Mr. Ugel is a former insider in the lottery business, and he comments on the Illinois state government's quixotic attempts to make the lottery really pay for the state's citizens. In the process, he offers a depressing window into the adverse impact that lotteries have, ironically, on lottery winners. Commenting that "nobody is immune to lottery fever," Mr. Ugel writes, "I got out of the lottery industry because it and I had had enough of each other. It's a legitimate business, but it is an unseemly one - no one who spends any real time in it comes out smelling like a rose, myself included."

I ask this to all Arkansans: Is this the kind of corrosive societal influence to which you really want to expose your children?

Finally, if you want the Church's teaching on gambling, including lotteries intended to fund public education, here it is from Paragraph 163G of The United Methodist Book of Discipline:

"Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice. Where gambling has become addictive, the Church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual's energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends. The Church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unneccesary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling - including public lotteries - as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government."

If you are a resident of the state of Arkansas, please vote 'no' to the lottery measure and encourage others to do the same.