IMAGINE you are making a paltry income doing some relatively menial job. Paying the bills, buying groceries, trying to insure your car or house are all difficult expenditures to make. You dream of financial security, of being able to buy a nice house or a sleek car. It is readily apparent to you that the best chance you have of getting out of the financial doldrums is to win the lottery. Yes, a one in roughly 150 million chance of winning the Mega Millions seems like the best bet for a big return on a $1 investment. However, when individuals ignore the long odds of lotteries they waste money that could be spent on life’s necessities, . Because lotteries are seen by the poor as the best get-rich-quick scheme available due to their economic status as well as because of the state’s encouragement of gambling, they operate as an unjustand regressive tax that harms society more than it helps.
Lottery tickets certainly are cheap: in Virginia, each play costs $1. That doesn’t seem like much in the grand scheme of things and for a large chunk of the population, buying a lottery ticket every now and then is certainly something one does “for kicks.” Yet if someone is making about $20,000 a year and supporting a family, which is about the poverty line in Virginia, buying lottery tickets is a wasteful exercise when the odds of winning are examined. Nevertheless, numerous lower-class people buy tickets despite the absurd odds of winning big. A recent Carnegie Mellon University study found that the poorer an individual feels, the more likely that person will be willing to spend money on lottery tickets. The National Gambling Impact Study Commission published results in 1999 indicating that 5 percent of lottery players purchase 51 percent of lottery tickets. Due to the long odds, lotteries are often called a “math tax” as players don’t necessarily realize just how unlikely winning is.
There are a couple reasons why lotteries are unjust. The over-arching one is that regressive tax systems tax the poor more than the rich, failing to account for the ability of the wealthy to better support societal necessities. If far fewer wealthy individuals purchase lottery tickets than poorer ones and large portions of the monies raised go to pay for important things like education, roads and other necessities, it violates the basic tenant of a progressive tax system that those who have more should pay more to permit the continuing function of society. John McCain put it best in 2000 when he said “I think [we have this tax system] to some degree because we feel obviously that wealthy people can afford more.” In order to maintain society, those with more must pay more to allow government to function. Otherwise, there would not be enough money for education, programs like Social Security or Medicare, or for anything else the government does to provide a better and functioning world for all. Lotteries undo this by encouraging poor people to throw money away based on hopeless dreams of winning a lot of cash, funds that go to pay for the facilities and roads they employ along with everyone else.
This encouragement of gambling is another reason lotteries are unjust as states go too far in trying to get people to play the lottery through constant advertising and by placing machines in neighborhood stores. By doing this, states end up violating their responsibility to look out for the best interests of the public, in this case the poorest members of it. The NGISC argues that as a result of the pressure to maintain or increase lottery revenue, states “have exceeded their modest objective of enhancing public services, and instead have irresponsibly intruded gambling into society on a massive scale.”
Some will say that lotteries are an optional activity where people are not forced to buy lottery tickets but freely choose to do so. While it is true that poor Americans can choose to not buy lottery tickets, the statistical evidence shows that they are the main purchasers, a fact that can be attributed to the advertising efforts of the state and to the poor economic status of the buyers. If the state had the best interests of their citizens in mind instead of just trying to raise money to shore up budget woes, many would likely terminate their lottery programs so as to stop “taxing” the poorest members of society.
As lotteries serve as a regressive tax on the citizens who can least afford it and because the government freely encourages these people to buy tickets, state lotteries are unjust institutions that harm people and violate the government’s role in society. All states should actively work to discontinue their lotteries for the sake of these Americans.
Geoff Skelley’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.skelley@cavalierdaily.com.
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