Stop Predatory Gambling

The reality of how much public funding actually comes from lotteries

by spgadmin

Rachel Norton, a San Francisco School Board member, recently wrote an excellent post on why the Lottery has failed as a public policy:

“…I was chagrined to read in the PAC/PPS report that more than a few people are still wondering why education funding in California is in trouble — don’t we have all that lottery money? Now, anyone involved in K-12 education in California knows that the lottery has never been a significant source of income for California’s schools, no matter what voters were told in 1984 when the lottery was created. But how to explain why?

Thank goodness for the California Budget Project (CBP). I subscribe to their daily “California Budget Bites” e-newsletter (highly recommended, by the way!), and this week they sent out a kind of top ten list detailing urban legends about California’s budget. Number four is “California’s schools don’t have a money problem,” but I wrote in to ask whether they couldn’t specifically address the lottery funds (or lack thereof) in a future post. A few days later, that explanation appeared! In a nutshell, CBP calls the lottery, as a school funding mechanism, a “sucker bet,” because it provides less than two percent of revenues for education. Even if lottery revenues tripled, in 2007-08 that would have amounted to five cents of revenue for every dollar the state spent on education.

That’s right. 2% of revenues for education. So in addition to being the most predatory business in America today, how can anyone argue that the California Lottery has been successful as a revenue source? Why should it continue to exist?