Gambling for Education

The New York Times had an interesting article this weekend about the problems associated with governments using lotteries to fund public schools.

Now, on the one hand, I’m all for using lottery cash for public schools because that’s one form of taxation I don’t have to be subject to. Yay!

But having the government encouraging people to gamble for any reason is a little weird. And what happens when the state isn’t raking in enough lotto money to pursue whatever they want to do? Well, if not enough people are buying tickets, pull in more customers by increasing payouts.

But that cuts into revenues too.

What you REALLY need to do is increase your “core” lotto buyer base. You know the folks. They’re the ones that blow hundreds or thousands of dollars a week on the lotto. And how do you get more people crazy enough to do that? Make the games more addictive, of course. Games with instant winnings, video lottery terminals, and keno all encourage marginal gamblers to stretch their boundaries, thereby bringing in more cash for education.

And since few public schools teach their pupils about sound fiscal management, or even informal logic, future citizens will be more than willing to throw their paychecks away for the hope of unearned riches and, of course, public education.

What a utopian dream. We can have the perfect public education system if only we can create more gambling addicts.

Tags: education, funding, lotto, public schools

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.