Lottery is an investment only in education
by Barry Henderson
Tennessee's lottery gets underway next week. It's the first such statewide gambling opportunity to gain legal auspices in a couple of hundred years, unless you consider church-sponsored bingo such an opportunity. The state has pussy-footed along behind the national curve in establishing a lottery. But here it comes.
Hand-wringers fear that the legalized lottery, with tickets from $1 to $5 and an array of possible jackpots, will consume much of the indispensable disposable income of the state's less well-off, most vulnerable people. I hope that doesn't happen to any measurable degree, but I suspect that those who become addicted to gambling may already be excessively gambling illegally and that they are also equally susceptible to expensive addictions of other kinds.
This is the thing to remember about organized gambling, legal or otherwise. The odds are stacked against you, always. Otherwise, the activity could not afford to be organized. There is the possibility of windfall rewards, but none should be expected. Gambling, such as the Tennessee lottery holds out, is a game, just a game, and should be taken that way. In the land of Vol football, it may be risky to suggest that games are just games, but they are.
Chances are, over the next year or two, you will have known someone who wins a substantial sum playing the lottery. That certainly does not change the odds in your favor, but it will likely influence you to play more, to buy more tickets.
If it weren't for the state's guaranteed percentage, its revenue from lottery sales, the whole idea would be unthinkable. In effect, the state is skimming off what the outfit would skim off in an illegal lottery. In Tennessee, a legal lottery would also be unpalatable if the proceeds weren't dedicated to improvements in funding for education. We want more Tennessee high school graduates going on to college. We also want more money and attention devoted to kindergarten programs. The lottery holds out at least the possibility for those things. Make that a strong probability.
So the motive for buying a lottery ticket now and then is noble enough. And someone's going to win something every week. The big scores will be recorded, and they'll be well publicized. But the chances are the big winner who retires for life by picking the right lottery number won't be you.
Have fun, starting next Tuesday at 12:01 a.m., but don't look at the lottery as an investment, except in education. Play responsibly, just as the state suggests. Keep it a game, and educate yourself on the odds of cashing in on a big winning ticket.
Betting on Choice
The annual Right to Life march, one of those events that brings together odd groups of dyed-in-the-wool Baptists with a smattering of unreconstructed Catholics, was held in Knoxville last Sunday. That it attracted only about 150 fervent anti-abortion marchers is not news so much as there was no concomitant, organized pro-choice response.
Maybe that was because the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision giving women the right to choose a legal abortion was still 10 days away. There's still time for a pro-choice rally, and there should be one.
It's a year in which anti-abortion legislation is faring better around the country than it has in recent years. The president is anti-choice. His next Supreme Court appointment could lead to a reversal of the entire doctrine that lends women the right to decide, in private consultation with their doctors, whether to terminate an early pregnancy. Surely some pro-choice sentiment should be manifesting itself here.
Kate Michelman, who's been president for 18 years of the national rallying and lobbying group NARAL Pro-Choice America, defines the entire issue: "Who decides? Politicians or women themselves?" Is that not a stupid question to have to ask and an outrageously obvious answer to have to organize to defend? Obviously, though, we still do.
January 15, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 3
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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