Lottery

The Lottery Oversight Commission is meeting!
Will wonders never cease? Thank you First Amendment. Time/place after the break.

My friends are sick of me talking and writing about the lottery. And when one of my fellow front-pagers recently won a thousand bucks on a $20 ticket, I confess to thinking, "awwww, maybe it's not so terrible." But the truth is, the lottery IS so terrible, as Steve Ford, the editorial page editor at the N&O. wrote today.

To pirate a line from "All the King's Men," North Carolina's state lottery was conceived in sin and born of corruption. We may never learn all the gory details surrounding its passage, but to say that its supporters in the General Assembly finagled it through by hook and by crook pretty much conveys the spirit of the thing.

Anyone who has been around BlueNC for any time at all knows I hate the so-called North Carolina Education Lottery. I hate everything about it, but mostly I hate the fact that our elected officials have seen fit to bet the future of public education on their ability to coax mostly poor people into gambling.

So my natural instinct is to be sympathetic to people who want to stop the lottery in its tracks by suing the state for not following proper procedures when the monstrosity was approved. But the more I read about these people, the more disgusted I become.

According to the N&O, the plaintiffs in the case include Paul Stam, the Wake County Taxpayers Association and the N.C. Family Policy Council. These folks were against the lottery in the first place, and they've been looking for an angle to stop it ever since.

So why to they have to lie about what they're doing now?

They say their goal is not to end it -- but to make sure its passage followed the state constitution.

I may have promised I'd never write another lottery post, but the recent news about the shortfall in gambling revenues cannot go unnoticed. North Carolina is facing a potential $200 million problem around funding education because not enough good people in our state have been seduced by the siren song of easy money.

Even as players lined up across North Carolina last week to drop their dollars on chances at a big Powerball jackpot, officials acknowledged the new state lottery has a $200 million problem. Overall sales for the games' first fiscal year are expected to miss the goal by at least that much, adding significant financial pressure to education programs that the lottery was created in 2005 to support.