THE STATE’S official, permanent, legalized and constitutionalized numbers racket keeps running into trouble with the number that counts most to those ceaselessly trying to promote it: how many college scholarships it can hand out. Which is the high-minded rationale for the lottery.
The terse front-page headline in Saturday’s paper summed up the lottery’s latest multimillion-dollar problem: “Lottery forced to tap reserve/ Came up short for spring scholarships, higher-ed chief says.” Twenty million dollars short of its haul the previous fiscal year, to be more exact. Which is why the lottery is dipping into the special $20-million reserve fund the Legislature had to create for it in 2009. It seems the lottery keeps falling short. Why? As an old fisherman might explain it, the suckers just ain’t bitin’ like they used to. Can they be wising up?
Whatever the reason, the lottery and its increasingly dependent adjunct, the state’s Department of Higher Education, are having to scramble. Socialized gambling, like socialized medicine, can be a complicated business to administer. What’s to be done?
Why, just use brighter, shinier lures to reel ’em in. Listen to the lottery’s director, one Bishop Woosley. (FYI, that’s a proper name, not an ecclesiastical title.) Arkansas’ bishop of gambling has all kinds of new ideas about how to expand his diocese. Here’s his latest: new, keno-style games that promise to keep the gulls standing in front of their screens while winning numbers are announced. Think of slot-machine addicts at casinos, playing and playing and playing till they’re played out.
Bishop Woosley envisions attracting new marks-like “someone who may be just sitting in a tavern and just want to sit there and play for 30 minutes.” If not a lot longer. And not just in bars but restaurants, airports . . . you name it. And who may play the lottery on impulse. Just to pass the time of day. Or night. And so may fall into Bishop Woosley’s newest net. For vice as well as virtue has its evangelizers who seek converts. “It’s new money,” Director Woosley exults, and you can almost see him salivate at the prospect of this new, lucrative market. For there’s no limit to it, and there won’t be so long as there’s one born every minute.
PERHAPS best of all, this already well established way to soak the poor will have a new, glossy moral cover. It’ll be conducted in the name of a good cause: Higher Education! Oh, education, what crimes, or at least perfectly legal rip-offs, are committed in thy name! Every low scheme needs a high purpose to make it complete.
The economic principle behind this latest twist to an old dodge isn’t exactly new. It’s the same one that’s been used to justify or at least rationalize the lottery since its glittering start. It’s so old an approach there’s a folk saying that sums up its m.o.-rob Peter to pay Paul. Or, more precisely in this case, take from the poor and give to the middle class. That is, take from the poorest and most gullible of our people, the kind of suckers who think of gambling as some kind of investment, and use the proceeds to finance college scholarships that go largely to the children of the middle class. That’s been the basic operating principle of this scam from its start.
Despite its high-sounding name (Arkansas Scholarship Lottery), essentially the lottery remains a voluntary tax on the poor to finance education for the kids of the better-off. Think of it as social justice in reverse. This latest twist is only a slightly more brazen version of the same old rip-off, with the same winners and losers. And the only thing required to pull it off is the kind of shamelessness that can justify taking the poor by invoking the good name of education. For who can be against education?
BUT FOLKS are catching on. It’s got to the point where even legislators are starting to have qualms as the lottery’s cover is blown. To quote Stephanie Flowers, a state senator from Pine Bluff, on this latest way to rip off the poor: It’s the difference between“watching a dog or a horse running around a track as opposed to just buying a ticket and just for one second, you scratch and one second you look at a monitor and . . . you don’t even get to dream about what if the horse crossed the line.”How efficient. It cuts out all the folderol and cuts right to the object of the whole game: Rip off the suckers. And this new approach is a lot easier on the ponies and hounds. Even if it may be harder on the conscience. To quote Ms. Flowers, who doesn’t represent exactly the richest of constituencies in this state:
“I am concerned about the poorest of Arkansans, particularly in my district, spending so much money on this lottery. Even though I appreciate the purpose of scholarships, I really don’t see where we are getting the benefit of the money that we are putting in. It is very difficult for me to want to move forward and bring something else in to entice people to pull money out [of] their pocket . . . .” Like a lot of other folks, Stephanie Flowers has caught on: This latest proposal is just one more way to separate the poor from what money they’ve got, even if it’s a little slicker and a lot faster way than the old pigeon drop.
A state with more self-respect would come up with a better way to finance our colleges and universities than making higher education dependent on games of chance. It would set up a scholarship program financed directly and openly by the taxpayer, and establish higher qualifications for those scholarships. That way, the proportion of students actually finishing college, not just starting it, might be higher and the need for the current profusion of remedial courses might be less.
But we live in an era when what counts in higher education seems to be the number of bodies at our schools and universities, not how much those students are learning or whether they stay in school long enough to finish their degree.
Why not establish a better, simpler, more open and accountable way to finance college scholarships for Arkansas students? Or would such an approach be considered unspeakably honest and responsible?
Editorial, Pages 14 on 04/24/2014