Stop Predatory Gambling

Who stands for the children of the Lottery Class?

by spgadmin

Education advocates are pressing the Oregon Lottery Commission to reduce what they say are overly generous payouts to bars and taverns that host the state’s video gambling machines. Stand for Children and other groups say the lottery has provided excessive profits to those retailers, at the expense of schools and other programs that receive lottery dollars.

“The lottery was created to maximize benefits for schools and other public purposes, not to subsidize bars and taverns,” Holly Pruett, the executive director of the group, said Tuesday.

Bars and taverns now get an average of about 24 cents for every dollar that gamblers spend in the lottery’s machines. Stand for Children says the rate should be reduced to 16 percent.   

There are hundreds of well-intentioned people like Ms. Pruett who use the profits from predatory gambling to address important public priorities but possess little understanding about the predatory gambling trade’s business model. Or how it violates America’s core democratic principle of equal citizenship. Or the central role its played in creating a Lottery Class in our country. The Lottery Class represents the more than one out of five Americans who, according to the Consumer Federation of America, believe the best way to achieve long-term financial security in America is to play the Lottery.

The government program of state-sponsored predatory gambling has turned millions of people who are small earners with the potential to be small savers into a new class of habitual bettors. We have a shrinking middle class in America in large part because of predatory institutions and one of the very worst is the Lottery. It is not possible to have a large Lottery Class and a strong, expanding middle class at the same time.

When people like Ms. Pruett begin to understand the issue of predatory gambling, I predict she’ll be standing right alongside us because the way we raise money to help children says as much about our principles and values as the way we spend it.