Selling Sloth

In 1990, Zell Miller, running for governor of Georgia, figured out a way to increase spending on education without raising taxes: create a lottery to fund scholarships for high school achievers. Miller's proposal, "Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally" (HOPE), caught on and helped sweep him into office.

HOPE works. It has financed higher education for hundreds of thousands of students in Georgia. It also seems wondrously simple: a voluntary tax (no one is forced to buy lottery tickets) to fund a clear, concise, and universally acclaimed goal. Every high school student in Georgia with at least a B average now has the opportunity to attend one of Georgia's universities; if they keep up their Bs in college, they're funded until graduation. HOPE brought Miller national attention, and numerous state governments are considering copying the program.

But despite HOPE's success, there's a trap in its seeming simplicity. Lotteries aren't taxes, but they certainly aren't free. They compromise values, feed a very dangerous industry, and end up snuffing out the success of even the most well-intentioned initiatives. Other states should copy the educational blueprint of the HOPE program, but they shouldn't copy the funding.

By adopting lotteries, state governments put themselves in the awkward and self-defeating position of having to betray the values that they usually hold dear. Lottery officials rely on deceptive advertising of the sort that state governments normally try to harness. The whole business of lotteries depends on convincing people that their number might come up--in fact that their number

come up if only they play enough. After all, lottery officials reason, if people don't buy tickets there isn't as much money to fund education.

The result is advertising like one television spot in Connecticut that showed a smiling young man:

When I was younger, I suppose I could have done more to plan my future. But I didn't. I guess I could have put some money aside. But I didn't. Or I could have made some smart investments. But I didn't. Heck, I could have bought a Connecticut Lotto ticket, won a jackpot worth millions, and gotten a nice big check every year for 20 years. And I did! I won!"

A voice-over followed as the young man grinned, "Overall chance of winning is one in 30." One in 30, of course, was the chance of winning a small prize and a smile from your convenience store owner, not of striking it rich.

Unlike other sweepstakes and raffles, state lotteries are not required to publish the honest odds of winning. Why don't they? Because the odds are virtually zero. States that run lotteries also focus their efforts, and in many ways their deception, on the people who are most susceptible to their message--the people who the state normally tries the hardest to support: the poor.

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