GLORIA JIMÉNEZ

Gloria Jiménez married immediately after she graduated from high school, worked briefly, had two children, and then, after her younger child started school, continued her own formal education. This essay, written for a composition course at Tufts University in 2003, was her first publication.

Against the Odds, and against the Common Good (Student Essay)

State-run lotteries are now so common — thirty-nine states and Washington, D.C., operate lotteries — that the states probably will never get out of the lottery business. Still, when all is said and done about lotteries bringing a bit of excitement into the lives of many people and bringing a vast amount of money into the lives of a few, the states should not be in the business of urging people to gamble.

And they do urge people. Consider a slogan used in Maryland, “Play Today. Cash Tomorrow.” If the statement were, “Get a job today and you will have cash tomorrow,” it would be true; it would make sense, however small the earnings might be. But “Play Today. Cash Tomorrow” falsely suggests that the way to have money tomorrow is to buy a ticket today. In fact, buying a ticket is an almost sure-fire way of getting nothing for something.

Maryland is not the only state that uses a clever slogan to get its citizens to part with hard-earned money. New York’s ads say, “You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play,” and Oregon’s ads say, “There Is No Such Thing as a Losing Ticket.” This last slogan — which at first glance seems to say that every ticket will benefit the purchaser — is built on the idea that the state’s share of the money goes to a worthy cause, usually education or some social service. But no matter how you look at it, this slogan, like the others, urges people to buy a product — a jackpot — that they have almost no chance of receiving.

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The chief arguments in favor of state-run lotteries seem to be these: (1) people freely choose to participate; (2) funds are used for education or for other important services; (3) if this source of funding disappears, the states will have to compensate by imposing taxes of one sort or another; (4) operation by the government ensures that the lotteries are run honestly; and (5) lotteries create jobs. We can respond briefly to the last two points, and then concentrate on the first three.

5 It probably is true that the lotteries are run honestly (though I seem to recall reading in the newspaper about one state in which corruption was found in administering the lottery), but that is not the point. If it is wrong to encourage people to gamble, it is hardly relevant to say that the game is run honestly. The other point that can be dismissed briefly is that lotteries create jobs. This argument is usually advanced in connection with the creation of casinos, which surely do create jobs, not only in the casinos but also in nearby restaurants, parking lots, movie theaters, and so forth. But lottery tickets are sold in places where the clerks are already employed. Presumably the only new jobs created by the lottery are the relatively few jobs of the people who dream up the slogans or who are in charge of collecting and processing the receipts.

The three other claims require more attention. The first, that people freely choose to participate, probably is largely true. Although some buyers are compulsive gamblers, people who are addicted and therefore cannot really be said to choose freely, I grant that most people do have a free choice — although, as I have already said, I think that some of the slogans that states use are deceptive, and if this is the case, purchasers who are misled by the ads are not entirely free. Consider a slogan that Illinois used on billboards, especially in poor neighborhoods: “This Could Be Your Ticket Out.” Yes, a person might hit the jackpot and get out of poverty, but the chances are one in several million, and to imply that the lottery is a reasonable option to get out of present poverty is to be deceptive. Further, the message is essentially unwholesome. It implies that the way out is luck, rather than education and hard work. Of course, luck plays a part in life, but 99.99 percent of the people who rely on the ticket as the “ticket out” of poverty are going to be terribly disappointed. But again, we can grant that except for gambling addicts, people who buy lottery tickets are freely doing so.

Probably the strongest claim is that the funds are used for important purposes, usually education. This claim apparently is true: the legislators are smart enough to package the lottery bills this way. And the revenue gained seems enormous — $20 billion in 2002, according to the New York Times (May 18, 2003, sec. 4, p. 1). On the other hand, this amount is only about 4 percent of the total revenue of the states. That is, this amount could be raised by other means, specifically by taxation, but legislators understandably do not want to be associated with increasing taxes. And so, again, advocates of state lotteries emphasize the voluntary nature of the lottery: by buying lottery tickets, they say, people are in effect volunteering to give money to the states, in exchange for the chance (however remote) of getting a ticket out. Buying a ticket, in this view, is paying an optional tax; if you don’t want to pay the tax, don’t buy the ticket.

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I now get to the point in my argument where I may sound condescending, where I may offend decent people. The point is this: studies show that most of the tickets are bought by people who don’t have much money, people who are near the bottom of the economic scale. According to one study, adults whose income was under $10,000 spent nearly three times as much buying lottery tickets as did adults who earned $50,000 or more.¹ I say that this argument is delicate because anyone who advances it is liable to be accused of being snobbish and paternalistic, of saying, in effect, “Poor people don’t know how to manage their money, so we ought to remove temptation from their eyes.” But such a reply does not get to the central issues: the central issues are (1) that the state should not tempt people, rich or poor, with dreams of an easy buck and (2) that education and social services are immensely important to the whole of society, so they should not be disproportionately financed by the poor and the addicted.

Let me end a bit indirectly. Surely everyone will grant that tobacco is a harmful product. Yes, it is legal, but everyone knows it is harmful. The state puts very heavy taxes on it, presumably not to raise revenue but to discourage the use of tobacco. We agree, surely, that it would be almost criminal if, in an effort to increase its revenues, the state enticed people to smoke — for example, by posting billboards showing attractive people smoking or cartoon characters that appealed to children. Would we say, “Oh, well, we need the revenue (from the taxes) to provide services, so let’s make smoking as attractive as we can to get people to buy cigarettes”? No, we would say, “People should not smoke, but if they will, well, let’s use the revenue from the taxes for two chief purposes: to dissuade people from smoking and to treat people who have become ill from smoking.”

10 State legislators who genuinely have the interests of their constituents at heart will not pass bills that put the state into the lottery business and that cause the state to engage in an activity that is close to pickpocketing. Rather, they will recognize that, however unpopular taxes are, taxes may have to be raised to support education and social services that the people rightly expect the state to provide. It’s against the odds to expect politicians to act this way, but let’s hope that some politicians will do the right thing and will vote for the common good.