No justification for making lottery more ‘competitive’

WITH LOTTERY SALES still increasing three months after North Carolina rolled out its own lottery, legislators say it’s too early to decide whether they need to make changes to stay competitive.

That’s good in that most of the changes that have been discussed are bad. It’s bad in that there are a few changes that need to be made, whether the new competitor to the north drains off any revenue or not.

Some changes should never even be considered. At the top of that list are our absolute ban on video gambling and our restrictions on advertising.

The video gambling ban is an outgrowth of our state’s disastrous experience with private-sector gambling. Video gambling combines flashing lights, rapid-fire action and immediate gratification in a way that activates pleasure centers in the brain and creates a stronger addiction than most drugs, legal or illegal.

It was bad enough for private businesses to lure unsuspecting dupes into a life of addiction; for the government to do such a thing would be intolerable. That’s why lawmakers allowed only delayed-gratification games (think Powerball) and instant-win options that offer no illusion of skill (think scratch-off tickets).

It’s also intolerable for the government to try to convince people to gamble — or squander their money in any other way, for that matter. That’s the main idea behind our modest advertising restrictions, which outlaw targeting poor people and trying to convince them that the lottery is their great hope for a better life.

Do those restrictions put the lottery at a competitive disadvantage? Probably. But the amount of money the lottery could generate is only one consideration. We could certainly generate more revenue if we didn’t let income tax filers write off their federal taxes and property taxes, but we believe it’s wrong to make people pay taxes on taxes. We could generate more if we taxed prescription drugs, but we have decided it’s wrong to tax something so essential to life. And of course, we could separate people from more of their money if we offered the most addictive forms of gambling and promoted it with sleazy come-ons that exploit weakness.

Beyond the question of values, it’s important to keep lottery revenue in perspective. Contrary to popular belief, the lottery doesn’t generate a lot of money. This year, $287 million of the $3.9 billion that the state is spending on public and higher education — about 7 percent — comes from the lottery. If you add in the $2 billion in school property taxes, lottery funding drops to less than 5 percent of the total. It contributes even less to K-12 funding — just $60 million, or barely more than 1 percent of state and local funding. So if lottery sales were to drop by 10 percent, we’d have one tenth of 1 percent less to spend on the schools.

But that’s assuming you didn’t make the lottery more efficient, as Gov. Mark Sanford suggests. He wants to cut lottery retailers’ sales commissions from the obscene 7 percent to a merely outrageous 6 percent. It’s a fine idea, and a better one would be to abandon the lottery entirely, since it was always a terrible idea on so many levels.

We won’t hold our breath for that to happen. But it’s certainly not too much to ask that legislators not plunge our state even deeper into the unseemly business of thinking up creative, seductive new ways to con people out of their money.