That's the headline in a Winston-Salem Journal editorial today advising North Carolina legislators to get ?education? out of the lottery, as in North Carolina Education Lottery. (This is different than getting the lottery out of education, which is a common practice in assigning places in overbooked charter schools.)
According to a 2007 report by CBS News most of the forty-two states that ran ?lotteries?a $54 billion a year business?back then?claimed funding for education from the gambling proceeds. And ?most of the lottery sales,? concluded CBS, ?never make it to a classroom.? The CBS investigation found that 50 cents of every gambled lottery dollar was given back in prize money and operating expenses took another 20 cents, leaving just 30 cents of every lottery dollar going back to the state.
CBS doesn't connect all the dots between that 30 cents and education budgets, but it did talk to a bunch of politicians who threw up their moral-outrage hands, including then Illinois Govenor Rod Blagovich, who called the lottery a ?shell game.? (He should know!)?A friend of mine who helped start New York state's lottery in the 1970s, an idea?sold to voters at the time as the funding savior for public education, said it was ?a big lie.?
And so it goes, presumably, the same in?the Tar Heel State, which is facing a $3.7 billion deficit for 2011, as many other places. The continuing recession ?threatens to land a staggering blow to public education next year,? says the Journal editorial, which ?should further expose the hypocrisy of North Carolina's so-called education lottery.?
But what exactly?is the hypocrisy here??It used to be that gambling was considered something like a mortal sin?only our poor dear morally bankrupt ?Indians? and desert fluzzies and mafiosa could run casinos?and so it seemed a perfect form of moral equivalency to use the ill-gotten gains from lotteries (casinos for the common man)?to educate our dear little children.?Wink-wink.
Okay, keep your eye on the red ball, everyone.
The lottery's impact in North Carolina may be ?small potatoes,? as the Journal says, but ?every million dollars?indeed every dollar?counts.? It would be nicer if the paper found some moral outrage here rather than simply calling the lottery ?an unreliable source? of funds. But at least the paper calls attention to the fact that lottery funds are being ?diverted? from education programs to the state's ?general fund.?
The paper seems to be arguing that ?a restructuring of state government to eliminate waste and avoid major cuts to education? would be a good thing.?And perhaps there is something there that ?could result in a more stable source of future funding for education that does not rely on and is not connected to state-sanctioned gambling.?
That the paper doesn't explain why lottery earnings are any less stable than housing sales, junk bonds, or tobacco farming seems to get lost in the rush to get a ?message to our youth? that there is no future in the false hope of unearned riches.?
I'll take that?I think. But I still don't know which shell the money is under.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
