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We're all in a lottery Thursday, Sep 18, 2008 By John Brummett I don't know Jim Walton, but I know people who say he's a fine fellow. I mean no disrespect to him; he is as entitled as anyone to express himself politically and to put his money where his mouth might be. I merely wish to point out that you could say that Walton already won his lottery. His winning number was to come into this world as the son of Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart. You call that jackpot. Ding, ding, ding. Now Walton has sent a $75,000 personal check to the Arkansas Family Council, those religious fundamentalists who want to remake all our conduct in their narrow-minded image. Walton wants the money to be applied to the Council's efforts to defeat the proposal on the general election ballot in November to start a state lottery with proceeds going to higher education scholarships. There are many well-meaning reasons to oppose such a lottery. I respect those reasons. I simply reject all of them, some on account of their hypocrisy. If encouraging people to wager their meager earnings on an outside chance of enrichment is wrong, then we're wrong already with these casino monopolies we've bestowed on the horse track and dog track. Anyway, it's unclear why we would deny a poor man's right to a lottery ticket while we bail out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars a large financial corporation's failed gambling on fancy lottery tickets called derivatives. If encouraging people to wager their meager earnings on an outside chance of enrichment is regressively unfair to poor people, which it is, of course, then that merely is in keeping with our established state and local tax policy of maintaining microscopic income tax rates and hammering the poor people with the sales tax every time we need money. If this lottery proposal is too open-ended in that it might allow casino-type machines at convenience stores all over the state, then that would be with the permission of our elected state legislators, to whom this merely authorizing proposed constitutional amendment delegates details and oversight. If the proceeds of this lottery turn out less than what Lt. Gov. Bill Halter estimates in his championing of this proposal, as I wholly suspect, then it would still be money we didn't have before. If legislators use this new lottery money for a shell game to reduce existing state general revenue spending for scholarships, which they shouldn't, then we are all welcome to vote them out of office. Or we might choose to be thankful for the additional spending that gets authorized elsewhere, perhaps for something also worthy. After 54 years of life, here's what I've decided about happiness: It's all about having something to look forward to. Maybe for Walton it's pheasant-hunting. For others it might be the big ball game with Alabama. It might be Christmas. It might be next summer's vacation. It might be the forthcoming birth or a visit from a loved one. It might be the religious promise of eternal bliss with one's creator. Here's something else that some people might look forward to: Amid a life of hard and thankless work for an insufficient wage to cover obscenely rising costs of gasoline and health insurance, they might - just might - be able to turn the chanced investment of a few dollars on a lottery ticket into a whole lot of money that would ease their burden. Just because it's almost a certainty that Alabama is going to kill Arkansas is no damper on fan excitement about the forthcoming game. Remote chances can be the things of life-enriching adrenaline rushes. And it's all up to the participant's choice. I thought we were about individual responsibility. And we'll send some folks to college in a state with one of the lowest college-graduation rates in the country. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
