Metro Pulse/Rationally Speaking

Comment
on this story

by Massimo Pigliucci

Well, it's official: a majority of Tennesseans doesn't listen either to God or to reason: 58 percent of the 1.6 million voters who bothered to show up at the polls on the occasion of the last election approved the idea of a state lottery (59 percent in Knox County). Apparently, the gargantuan effort of the Southern Baptists, who distributed 3.2 million leaflets in their churches, was not enough to convince their fellow citizens and worshippers. In a supreme twist of irony, the Gambling Free Tennessee Alliance is in debt because of its campaign, and is seeking donations for $100,000 to cover the gap. The alliance's board of directors feels the urgency of the situation, since it turns out that board members are personally liable for the debt, which is why chairman of the board Rev. Skip Armistead urged the faithful to contribute.

Interestingly, according to an after-election poll conducted by Middle Tennessee State University, the Baptists failed in their anti-lottery effort largely because they were preaching to the converts. They put too little effort into reaching people of other denominations, or secular fence sitters. Such are the perils of cultism.

Not that the appeal to reason has fared any better. We all know how Tennesseans keep thinking, against all empirical evidence to the contrary, that a state income tax is evil and that an ever-increasing sales tax is the only acceptable way because "it gives you a choice" (of what? Which particular brand of gas or bread you buy, I guess).

It is indeed illuminating that even the fear of moral degeneracy combined with the strength of rational argument could not derail a state lottery. Greed trumps piety and reason. If the Legislature sets up a statewide lottery next year, Tennessee will become the 39th state to do so, simply recognizing that its citizens were doing it already (they spent $243 million on other states' lotteries in 2001).

Now what? Sen. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis), who has fought for this with remarkable (if arguably misguided) resilience since 1984, has already introduced a Senate Bill (no. 1 of the new Legislature) to make the lottery a reality by the end of 2003. He predicts $900 million in revenues, $300 of which will go to education in the form of scholarships, preschool programs, and much needed capital improvements for school systems. In fact, he has already put together a task force of 16 "education leaders" (including UT President John Shumaker) to study lottery systems in other states. One possibility is to copy Georgia's HOPE program and give scholarships to everybody who graduates with B or better from high school, although the newly elected governor, Phil Bredesen, rightly favors a more need-based approach to distribute the funds.

On the matter of the lottery, I tend to disagree even with many of my fellow liberals. Yes, a lottery is indeed a "stupidity tax" and, unfortunately, it is regressive. Then again, it has two advantages over a sales tax: on the one hand, the people who buy lotto tickets really do have a choice not to buy them (they don't have that choice when it comes to gas and bread). On the other hand, if a substantial amount of the money really will go to education, presumably—in the long run—we will have a citizenry educated enough to realize that it is stupid to gamble and that an income tax is a far better alternative.

Of course, this raises an interesting moral dilemma: If we (as educators, liberals, or what have you) think that a lottery is a terrible way of funding programs because it exploits the poor and uneducated, should we nevertheless take the money and run with it? I would argue yes, simply because the pragmatics here are far more important than the philosophical stand. We desperately need to take care of education in this state, and if a lottery is the only practical way to do it right now, so be it. Ironically, educators and liberals carry so little political weight in this state that we really cannot do otherwise than bow to the will of the voters and hope that the situation will be better decades down the road.

But perhaps we will not have to wait decades after all. One of the little-trumpeted (and few) pieces of good news emerging from the November elections is the fact that 83 percent of the Tennessee legislators who voted in favor of an income tax who were on the ballot were reelected. So much for the dire predictions of anti-income tax supporters, who were warning of a popular landslide against such misguided "traitors" of their constituencies. And we elected the relatively moderate Bredesen, not his viscerally anti-income tax opponent, Van Hilleary. Perhaps not all is lost in the State of Tennessee.