Lottery proceeds should not be part of shell game
Published September 17, 2013
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, September 16, 2013.
N.C. Education Lottery commissioners celebrated a milestone last week: Total sales since 2006 have surpassed $10 billion.
It’s clear that the lottery’s staff and retailers are doing their job in enticing North Carolinians to play the games. What isn’t clear today, however, is whether the lottery itself is doing the job for which it was sold to the North Carolina public.
The latest information from the lottery indicates that more than $2.9 billion has been transferred to state educational purposes -- mostly pre-school, early grades, college scholarship and school construction – since lottery sales began in 2006. But, in the same time legislators of both parties have cut billions from state education spending.
Politicians on both sides are now debating whether the Republican-led 2013 General Assembly increased education funding. By one measure they did. They increased the total education budget, after years of drastic cutting, by a small percentage. But, they did not increase it enough to cover the inflationary and growth costs that schools face. Thus, state spending per child will fall this year. It’s a simple matter of arithmetic.
The education cuts of the past five or six years have hit the areas to which lottery funds are designated, if not the very same programs. So the state is spending less per student on early childhood and primary grades, and cuts to higher education and increases in college tuition are offsetting much of the value of the financial aid that lottery proceeds provide to students and their families.
We concede that education might be even worse off without the lottery, but we also repeat our earlier argument that lottery proceeds have been used to shift the responsibility for education funding away from general taxpayers and to those willing to buy tickets.
September 17, 2013 at 8:49 am
TP Wohlford says:
This publication is part of Berkshire Hathaway. Does this mean that Berkshire Hathaway can, or should, simply move around some of its billions to let the Journal do business the way that it wants to, the way that it's done business for years?
Well, the answer is "maybe". Maybe there are reasons to move funds from a sector that is current doing well to another that needs some fixin'. I mean, it would be a shame for the Journal to go broke if it could be fixed up with a little cash, right? And we'd even say that such a refusal to move cash around would be "folly", right?
Well, why lock our Legislature (or or Congress, or each of the state and government agencies) into spending that we can all agree is pretty stupid? The recent Sequester treated us to a bunch of stories of stupid locked-in spending, where optional things were funded while needed functions were shut down.
Besides, repeat after me -- "Money is Fungible." That means, money is money, and amazingly, it refuses to stay where it was intended. I give an addict money for food, but that frees up what they have for drugs, therefore I just paid for drugs. We send a boatload of money to every state legislature for "education", and yea, in every case, it is spent for "education", but money that would've gone to "education" from other sources finds its way to... well name you silly expenditure, or even ones that are needed. You simply can't stop it.
LAST -- would educators, and their shills, give me a number of "how much is enough"? Seriously, a number. No answers that begin, "I just feel that..." Not gonna accept "it is never enough." I want an effin' number.
September 17, 2013 at 10:04 am
Norm Kelly says:
It was said so easily on the Simpsons, but I guess the way it gets spelled is "Duh!". This is what opponents of the state lottery said when we were told the proceeds would be ADDED to the education budget instead of REPLACING funds from the budget. Some of us were able to look around the rest of the country, review history, and see that virtually every state that made this claim didn't hold to it. Virtually every state had taken the same path that NC is taking, and apparently has been taking. The Republicans have not been in control for the past 5-6 years, so the blame for education cuts goes to the Dumocrats. That's an easy one to figure.
The Republican legislature has INCREASED spending in the current budget for education. This can NOT be argued. It may not have been enough to offset prior cuts by the Dumocrats, but sometimes baby steps are required. Better to spend more than to spend less, but still get blamed for a spending cut? How about we stop calling an increase a cut and stop calling a cut an increase? How about we start getting politicians who can speak the truth, and the media doesn't call them a liar? How about we have politicians who speak mistruths (for non-liberals, that's a lie!) stop being praised by the media?
The lottery was a bad idea from the beginning. When the government gets involved in a business, it hates competition. Gambling is bad, according to government agencies. Video poker had to be outlawed. Betting on football, basketball, baseball is bad for people, and must be banned by the state. But when the state wants to raise "some extra money", all of a sudden gambling is good for us. Talk about a confused policy. But since the state hates competition, outright bans competition, shuts down competition, then gambling by anyone other than the state is sought out & shutdown, and someone is prosecuted.
If this seems backwards to you, if you knew the education budget would eventually be reduced by an amount approaching what the lottery put into it, then you are a thinker and are doomed to be outlawed by liberal governments at every level.
