North Carolina certainly doesn’t need another difficult-to-enforce law, but the slim chance of it actually working is the least offensive part of a plan rattling around the General Assembly that would prohibit people who receive public assistance from playing the state lottery.
State Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam, R-Wake, wants to dismantle the N.C. Education Lottery a piece at a time through legislation he hopes will come up in the session that begins Wednesday. In addition to banning the play of welfare recipients, he’d also like to see the word “Education” removed from lottery advertising. His thinking: the lottery preys on the poor, some of whom buy tickets with public assistance money meant for necessities, and tying the games of chance to public education lends it an undeserved air of respectability.
He’s right. And whose fault is that?
It’s no coincidence that lottery tickets sell best in the state’s poorest counties. Lenoir County, where more than 23 percent of residents live at or below the federal poverty line, had per capita lottery tickets sales of $410.60 in 2011 — eighth in the state. Edgecombe County, where the poverty rate is nearly 16 percent, recorded per capital sales of $561 to lead the state. The lottery appeals most to people who can’t see another way of catching up to the relative affluence around them.
It’s impossible to call these people desperate without acknowledging the lottery as a desperate act of the state to raise revenue. And who’s more irresponsible, the guy who blows $400 a year he doesn’t have in hopes of striking it rich or the government that created and feeds that temptation? And greed? No one in government, Republicans included, should go there.
Restricting access to the lottery would hardly reduce the state’s complicity in this fleecing. No law, particularly a law so easily circumvented, can instill a sense of fiscal responsibility. Likewise, making the lottery’s long odds more apparent to players than they already are — in pamphlets at lottery retail outlets and on the lottery website — will not curb players’ enthusiasm. They already know their chances aren’t good because most lose much more than they win.
Disassociating the lottery from public education is equally useless. Few people buy a lottery ticket with the goal of paying a teacher’s salary, even though all players do that to a degree. Since the lottery began in 2005, players have pumped more than $32 million into Lenoir County education coffers, about $12 million into Greene County and about $6 million into Jones. The take would have been more had the Legislature not raided the till to help balance the state budget.
Odd at it seems, money’s not the point. We’re no fan of state-sponsored gambling, but we’re even less supportive of the state’s curtailing the freedom of residents — in this case, the freedom to spend as they desire, even foolishly. The General Assembly can’t legislate prudence, and shouldn’t try. Better than it take steps to create jobs, improve education, ensure equality and give the state’s poor more hope than they find in a long shot.
