When one person wins $315 million on a single lottery ticket, as the Powerball champ in West Virginia did, Americans bet even more on lotteries. It’s a good reason to call lotteries “The Sucker Tax.”

Yet lotteries are more than a levy upon the cerebrally challenged. They are a fraud upon taxpayers, who were told lotteries would bolster state and local government spending, particularly for education, without tax increases.

Unhappily, that promise was, like so many others we hear from politicians, a big, fat lie.

Yet let’s start from the beginning, with the lottery being a sucker’s bet. Like casino gambling, the odds in lotteries are stacked against the player. Occasionally, they win a trifle, but long term, regular players lose money, unless they hit the bazillion-to-one shot.

The lucky building contractor in West Virginia was not a regular player. He buys $100 in tickets, news reports have it, when the Powerball jackpot exceeds $100 million. He buys on a lark, just for fun.

In short, the lottery is a sure loser. You don’t have a better chance of winning if you play the same daily number, and you cannot predict, by following the numbers that do win, what number will come next. Each time the lottery machine juggles numbers to conjure the winning combination, you have the same chance of winning. Play once a day; play once a week. Play once a month or once a year. You have the same chance of winning as of getting kidnapped by aliens: zero.

One player profile is sadly typical. How often we see a poorly-clad woman in the 7-Eleven, toting a shoeless child, carton of cigarettes and six-pack of beer, plunk down $20 for lottery tickets. She can’t read the first sentence of an eighth-grade reader without tripping, but she can rattle off lottery combos with the lingual alacrity of a professional auctioneer.

Those who can least afford lottery tickets are some of the lottery’s biggest and best customers. They are the least educated and most dimwitted. Educated bureaucrats and politicians exploit their ignorance.

Thus, “The Sucker Tax.”

But back to the big lie.

Across America, elected officials pitched the lottery as a certain measure to swell government coffers, particularly for education. But guess what? It didn’t happen, Virginia being a fine example. Despite hundreds of millions in lottery revenues, the commonwealth suffers a catastrophic budget crisis, at least by the lights of the big spenders. A main problem? “Underfunded” public schools.

Other states tell similar stories. Everywhere, almost every day, we hear state officials and educrats whine about money problems that lotteries were supposed to alleviate. Even as the states unload trucks full of cash, the hue and cry for more spending gets louder.

If lotteries were as profitable as advertised, state lottery revenues should have eliminated the need for a federal education department. Its budget rises yearly.

The lottery’s failure to ease budget woes is no surprise.

The Leviathan State inexorably grows and spends excessively. Give politicians and bureaucrats, particularly educationists, more money, and they will spend it … then ask for more. That’s what happened with lottery money. Budgets rose to spend what lotteries collect; now, politicians are hooked on the extra revenue.

Imagine the fiscal calamity if everyone stopped playing. Fat chance.

Barnum said it: A sucker is born every minute.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: kirkwood@shentel.net.

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