what is your opinion on state run lotteries?

Question

im writing a short paper and i would like some more backround information. thanks! -ry

Answer 1

I don't have any ethical problems with gambling, but I do have a problem with most state sponsored lotteries. I live in NC and they just started an "Education Lottery" last year. The lottery was supposed to provide funds to help build new schools and hire more teachers to reduce class size. Here's what really happenned.

First, the lottery commission estimated how much money would be brought in by the lottery the first year. The actual returns from the lottery were much lower than the estimates, and they blamed it on people going to SC and VA to play the lottery.

Next, the lottery commissioner was awarded a bonus in the neighborhood of $100,000 because he was able to start the lottery early enough in the year so that the estimated lottery earnings could be considered as part of the states education budget.

When the education budget was created for the year, the funds from the lottery were use to reduce the amount of education funding that would normally have been provided for education in the budget.

Since the earnings for the year were lower than expected, the school systems received a very small increase in funds for the year.

The lottery was designed to help education, but it's not working out in this state. Since some of the prizes involve multi-year payouts, the lottery cannot be stopped at this point in time without defaulting on the payments to the winners. On a whole, the first year of the lottery in NC has been a mess.

Good luck with your paper.

Answer 2

Although State run lotteries do a lot of good things - the down side is that the State lottery officials rig them quite often so that the odds are or become harder for more people to win the BIG ONE as often. They do this by adding more numbers to the tickets thereby raising the odds of winning the big pot.

The plus side is that the pool of money that is split between the State and Lottery Officials are to help schools and education, keep taxes low, help emergency services and law enforcement services, create jobs, and help the State, and local economy. To which is lagging behind in. Promises made to the people of the state, but have been broken, or "put on back burner"

From state to state there are some similarities, as well as differences on distributions of all the funds collected from tickets sold. Also how much the jackpot climbs from tickets sold.

Here's a link so that you can do a little further research. Across the top of page it has listings of what you're asking.

http://www.oregonlottery.org/welcome.php