Fitzsimon File

Lottery lunacy update

Listening to any official discussion of the state's predatory lottery always produces some head -scratching moments and Friday's meeting of the Lottery Oversight Committee was no exception. Committee members were trying to figure out if the lottery is providing new funding for education or supplanting money that state lawmakers were already spending or would have allocated anyway.

Several committee members concluded the lottery has supplanted revenue for class size reduction and More at Four, Governor Mike Easley's program for at-risk kids.  Others worried that the lottery made it more difficult to raise additional revenue for schools, since people may believe the lottery has provided enough money. 

The law that created the lottery does not include specific language to prevent supplanting education funding and there's a good reason for that. It is impossible and a study the committee is considering will make that clear.  There is no way to know what lawmakers would have done without the lottery.

The only solution is one that lottery critics have long suggested. If the state is going to try convince people to waste their money on lottery tickets because politicians don't have the courage to raise revenue honestly and fairly, then at least use all the money for one-time expenses like school construction.

That doesn't completely erase the supplanting concern, but it would be a start. 

Lottery Director Tom Shaheen was asked about the controversy surrounding some of the instant games, in which tickets continue to be sold even after the top prize has already been won. Shaheen said because of outside pressure, presumably media reports and criticism from advocacy groups, the North Carolina lottery picks up the tickets after the top prizes are all claimed, though it takes several months to collect them all.

That means that in many games, people are buying tickets to win a prize that has already been claimed, though that doesn't bother Shaheen. He told the committee that people play the lottery for the smaller prizes too, and that "most people are playing for the game."  That's an odd take, considering that the advertising campaign for almost every instant lottery game is built around the top prize.

Still fighting the cold war

The cold war ended almost over almost twenty years ago but it feels like some folks on the right miss it terribly, judging from the nature of their rhetoric these days. Raleigh conspiracy theorist and magazine publisher Bernie Reeves said on the last WRAL-TV's Headline Saturday that the Democratic Party is like the Soviet empire in 1991, teetering on the edge of collapse, sneeringly pointing out that part of the problem was the nomination of a "multicultural" candidate for president.

Reeves then predicted that Republican John McCain would carry North Carolina with 70 percent of the vote, a bizarre forecast wildly out of line with every poll and no basis in reality. Most surveys show McCain a few points ahead of Barack Obama, making it likely to be the closest presidential contest in North Carolina in years. A Democrat has not carried the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

It's equally remarkable that the journalists on the show with Reeves didn't challenge either absurd statement. Maybe if he said that Obama was a Soviet spy and predicted that McCain would receive every vote in North Carolina one of the panelists might have challenged him.

The self-appointed energy guru of the right, Roy Cordato, also likes to employ the cold war references in his assault on almost every initiative to protect the environment. Cordato recently attacked Barack Obama and John McCain for their "energy socialism" in a recent essay in Spectator Magazine.

Cordato wants to abolish the fuel-efficiency standards for cars, remove all restrictions for CO2 emissions and end state government efforts to promote renewable energy use. He thinks it is all part of the plan by both political parties for "Soviet-style multiyear plans for energy independence."   McCain the communist. Who knew?

Turning the same old Leef

George Leef at the Pope Center to Dismantle Higher Education doesn't seem willing to concede the title of the most strident anti-everything think-tanker to Cordato yet, weighing in this week with comments that a Wall Street Journal article about preschool "strongly supports my long-held idea that new educational programs should always be presumed to be means for the education establishment to wring still more money out of taxpayers."

Leef wants us to always presume that every education program is only about punishing taxpayers, apparently moving beyond his open disdain for the very idea of public education to now questioning the motives of every single person and institution that come up with ways to improve the schools.

Making the state budget problem worse

The folks at the Civitas Institute have an idea to come up with money to cut the state gas tax and build more highways in urban areas in the state. They want to end both the transfer from the Highway Trust Fund to the General Fund and a smaller transfer from the Highway Fund, and shift the cost of all non-road construction functions to the General Fund too.

That comes to roughly $650 million from the General Fund that pays for schools, health care, prisons, and every other essential function of state government, all to cut the gas tax.  Conservative estimates put the budget shortfall facing lawmakers in 2009 at a billion dollars. What's another $650 from schools and children's health care? They must be Soviet-style programs too.  

We could also cut the gas tax by shutting down the UNC system, releasing all prisoners, and selling the State Capitol to a national hotel chain.  Look for those proposals next week from our friends at Civitas.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.