TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071089/07108900.056

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.6 KB | 68 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 19

The States Like the Odds


    Numbers games, sports betting and other forms of illegal
gambling have been mushrooming, as Pete Rose's troubles
testify. But the really explosive growth in the past 25 years
has been in gambling that is completely legal: state-sponsored
lotteries, offtrack betting parlors and the like. In fact, many
believe that the growth of legal betting has spurred illegal
wagering by spreading the idea that "it's O.K. to gamble." So,
the more governments sponsor various forms of wagering, the more
insistent grows a moral question: Should the states promote,
encourage and even hype the nation's betting frenzy?

    Proponents argue that people have always gambled and always
will -- so governments might as well cut themselves in on the
action. Lotteries painlessly raise billions for worthy causes
(education in most states, senior citizens' programs in
Pennsylvania). Lottery operators love to quote an 1826 remark
by Thomas Jefferson that lotteries are a kind of tax "laid on
the willing only." Chon Gutierrez, director of the California
lottery, goes so far as to assert, "The lottery is not gambling.
It's entertainment." And cheap entertainment at that, says
Edward Stanek, commissioner of the Iowa lottery, because ticket
buyers "can spend $1 and then spend the rest of the week
dreaming what they would do if they actually won."

    Opponents retort that the states are selling not dreams but
delusions. As early as 1776 the economist Adam Smith complained
in The Wealth of Nations that "in the state lotteries, the
tickets are really not worth the price." Today, in one popular
form of lottery, a bettor picks six out of 54 numbers; the odds
of getting the right six are 1 in 12.9 million.

    Many critics are especially upset by hard-sell lottery
advertising. An Illinois ad pictured a man scoffing at people
investing in savings bonds, and insisting that winning the
lottery is the only way an ordinary person can become a
millionaire. Valerie Lorenz at the National Center for
Pathological Gambling in Baltimore laments, "We used to say,
`Work hard, study hard, and you'll get ahead.' Now we say, `Just
gamble . . . Go for the big win.'"

    Lotteries offer an easy source of revenue for politicians
who lack the courage to raise taxes. The problem is that the
poor play quite as much as those who are better off and can more
easily afford it. Mark Michalko, former director of the
California lottery, disputes the idea that lotteries are in
effect a regressive tax on the poor. "The vast majority of
players are middle-income and higher," he says. Yet he concedes
that "there is some small percentage of people in the
lower-income brackets who play (to excess), and by definition
it is going to be a higher percentage of their income. But so
are food, clothing and a car."

    State-sponsored gambling is nowhere near the bonanza for
states it has been sold as. Illinois and Ohio, among other
states, have reduced tax-paid financing of schools as the
lottery cash came in. "So," says James Smith, superintendent of
the Wolf Branch School in Belleville, Ill., "the real benefit
is zero." Less than zero, actually. Smith complains that he
cannot get a bond issue authorized because local officials think
that schools are rolling in lottery money. Says Thomas Cummings,
head of the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling:
"Before this thing is through, there will be a legal bookie on
every block and corner of this country."