P-D:
Bill to re-allocate Illinois lottery proceeds to poor areas fails
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – A group of Chicago lawmakers just now presented a bill in the Illinois House that would redistribute the state’s lottery revenue based on which areas buy the most lottery tickets – meaning, poor urban areas, especially in Chicago. (The bill is HB618.)
If there’s anything more divisive in Illinois than party politics, it’s regional politics. It was little surprise, then, that rural and suburban lawmakers in both parties slapped this down, hard, on a 37-77 vote.
(One counter-argument heard on the floor: How about re-allocating all the state’s income tax revenue as well, to go to the areas that paid it? That was the line that pretty much killed it.)
President John F. Kennedy once said that a requirement for a President was that s/he is able to hold two contradictory views at the same time and not go crazy for it. That’s how I could describe my opinion about lotteries, or rather the opinions I absorbed from two people that know each other. One the one hand, lottos are a tax on the mathematically impaired. On the other hand, they are the only real chance that the average person has to get rich.
That said, why are we to assume that poor blacks are the only kind of people that buy lottery tickets, such that lotto revenue should be their personal slush fund? There are lots of white people that play the lotto, too.
