The States Like the Odds

By Shelagh Donoghue/Chicago and Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles

Numbers games, sports betting and other forms of illegal gambling have been mushrooming, as Pete Rose's troubles testify. But the really explosive growth in the past 25 years has been in gambling that is completely legal: state- sponsored lotteries, offtrack betting parlors and the like. In fact, many believe that the growth of legal betting has spurred illegal wagering by spreading the idea that "it's O.K. to gamble." So, the more governments sponsor various forms of wagering, the more insistent grows a moral question: Should the states promote, encourage and even hype the nation's betting frenzy?

Proponents argue that people have always gambled and always will -- so governments might as well cut themselves in on the action. Lotteries painlessly raise billions for worthy causes (education in most states, senior citizens' programs in Pennsylvania). Lottery operators love to quote an 1826 remark by Thomas Jefferson that lotteries are a kind of tax "laid on the willing only." Chon Gutierrez, director of the California lottery, goes so far as to assert, "The lottery is not gambling. It's entertainment." And cheap entertainment at that, says Edward Stanek, commissioner of the Iowa lottery, because ticket buyers "can spend $1 and then spend the rest of the week dreaming what they would do if they actually won."

Opponents retort that the states are selling not dreams but delusions. As early as 1776 the economist Adam Smith complained in The Wealth of Nations that "in the state lotteries, the tickets are really not worth the price." Today, in one popular form of lottery, a bettor picks six out of 54 numbers; the odds of getting the right six are 1 in 12.9 million.

Many critics are especially upset by hard-sell lottery advertising. An Illinois ad pictured a man scoffing at people investing in savings bonds, and insisting that winning the lottery is the only way an ordinary person can become a millionaire. Valerie Lorenz at the National Center for Pathological Gambling in Baltimore laments, "We used to say, 'Work hard, study hard, and you'll get ahead.' Now we say, 'Just gamble . . . Go for the big win.' "

Lotteries offer an easy source of revenue for politicians who lack the courage to raise taxes. The problem is that the poor play quite as much as those who are better off and can more easily afford it. Mark Michalko, former director of the California lottery, disputes the idea that lotteries are in effect a regressive tax on the poor. "The vast majority of players are middle-income and higher," he says. Yet he concedes that "there is some small percentage of people in the lower-income brackets who play ((to excess)), and by definition it is going to be a higher percentage of their income. But so are food, clothing and a car."

State-sponsored gambling is nowhere near the bonanza for states it has been sold as. Illinois and Ohio, among other states, have reduced tax-paid financing of schools as the lottery cash came in. "So," says James Smith, superintendent of the Wolf Branch School in Belleville, Ill., "the real benefit is zero." Less than zero, actually. Smith complains that he cannot get a bond issue authorized because local officials think that schools are rolling in lottery money. Says Thomas Cummings, head of the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling: "Before this thing is through, there will be a legal bookie on every block and corner of this country."