The Baytown Sun
By David Bloom
Published May 07, 2003
Today’s editorial was written by David Bloom, managing editor
of The Baytown Sun, on behalf of the newspaper’s editorial board.
Whole Lotto nothing
The just odds keep growing — in the state’s favor — for those dreamers who spend their money trying to win the big lottery in Texas.
In an effort to increase the size of the jackpots, the Texas Lottery Commission will debut a revamped version of the twice-a-week Lotto Texas tonight.
Gone is the system where players chose six numbers from a field of 54. The new rules will let players choose five numbers from a pool of 44, then choose another number, or bonus ball, from a separate field of 44. Those who match all five from the first field and the bonus ball would win the jackpot, which starts at $4 million.
The state says the revised game will give players additional ways of winning.
For example, players who match the first five numbers will win an estimated $10,000. Those who match four numbers in the first draw plus the bonus ball will win about $2,000 on a $4 million jackpot.
As we’ve argued before, lottery bets are a sucker’s wager, although that doesn’t seem to matter much to most starry-eyed lottery players.
The state is banking that higher odds against winning will drive up jackpots into the tens of millions, spurring increased ticket sales. State lottery officials predict jackpots could climb to as high as $100 million three times a year.
And those gigantic jackpots will breed new mountains of torn lottery tickets outside convenience stores or along the street.
We could go on and on about how the lottery really amounts to a poor man’s tax increase. And it is, but with our new revamped Lotto Texas, they’ve raised the odds from simply astronomical to intergalactic.
Numerically speaking, the chance of capturing the top prize in this new game is 47.7 million to 1. That’s nearly twice as long as the odds in the Lotto it replaces.
Hey, no one ever said getting rich was going to be easy. Of course, the idea behind a lottery is to hold out the prospect of unimaginable wealth for the lucky individual while making money for the state sponsoring it.
The comptroller’s office said the new game will increase lottery revenue to the state by about $50 million a year. Texas already gets about $1 billion a year from its lottery games. The money goes toward public schools.
What the lottery has done for nearly 21 years is convince Texans that their state-sanctioned gambling loss — because that’s what it usually is — goes for a good cause. But the suspicion has always been that the Legislature views the lottery take not as extra money for schools, only more money to spend on something else.
Another drawback: Texas lottery advertising freely mislead the young, old, poor and feeble-minded about the benefits of lottery games and the remote odds of winning.
Publicly sponsored ads promise players that everyone is a winner and that you can win every day with more prizes and better odds.
In essence, the lottery is a regressive tax. It may be voluntary, but the rest of us end up paying, too — in the form of a bigger and more hypocritical state government department incurably addicted to shell games.