This powerful essay by Elizabeth Winslow McAuliffe in Public Integrity shows how the lottery is a public policy failure by spotlighting two fact-based conclusions: 1) the evidence indicates that the original aims of the state lottery have not been fulfilled; and 2) the lottery cannot be defended as an ethical enterprise for government.
January 2017
Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank: Costs of Predatory Gambling Outweigh Any Benefits
This report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia concludes that the local benefits of casinos would be outweighed by costs such as increases in pathological gambling, crime and personal bankruptcy.
Prominent Independent Study Shows Casinos Have Made Native American Tribes Poorer
For more than 25 years, the casino lobby has told the American people that casinos are the engine to help Native American tribes prosper. Now The Economist, the world’s leading international magazine, spotlights how casinos have actually made tribal members poorer, pointing to a new study in the American Indian Law Journal showing that growing tribal gambling revenues can make poverty worse. The study looks at two dozen tribes in the Pacific Northwest between 2000 and 2010. During that time, casinos owned by those tribes doubled their total annual take in real terms, to $2.7 billion. Yet the tribes’ mean poverty rate rose from 25% to 29%. Some tribes did worse: among the Siletz poverty jumped from 21.1% to 37.8%. Below is both the story from The Economist and the study from the American Indian Law Journal.
Oregon launched an aggressive advertising campaign to promote the Lottery’s highly-addictive electronic gambling machines
This excellent blog post from The Tax Foundation highlights how the state of Oregon, after passing a smoking ban in bars and restaurants to restrict a dangerous activity, launched an aggressive advertising campaign to promote the Lottery’s highly-addictive electronic gambling machines to make up for the anticipated loss of revenue caused by the smoking ban.
The Tax Foundation – Reading Between the Lines of Oregon’s Video Lottery Terminals