FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2002 — Earlier in the week, Governor Jane Swift suggested that reducing payouts in the Massachusetts State Lottery might help beef up the state’s dwindling revenues a little. In an interview with the Boston Globe on Thursday, Stephen Crosby, Swift’s administration and finance secretary, characterized the proposal as "innovative" — which may just be the biggest line of crap this administration has tried to feed us yet (though I am ready to stand corrected on this one).

There is nothing remotely innovative about the lottery. It is, and has always been, a facile — and crummy — alternative to raising taxes. The state’s looming fiscal crisis does nothing to change this fact. Crosby’s going on to say that "the governor has made very clear that protecting the priorities of education and public safety are nearly paramount" smacks of political cynicism at its worse. Such hot-button issues — public safety! — should not be used to cloud the fact that Swift has put forth a very bad idea.

Media coverage of Swift’s proposal has so far focused largely on the fact that, as a money-raising scheme, it probably won’t work. The Mass Lottery, by far the most successful in the country, already rakes in almost $4 billion a year. Lowering payouts, the argument goes, could deter people from playing, thus chipping away at revenues rather than increasing them. As State Treasurer Shannon O’Brien put it, "Jane Swift is trying to break something that doesn’t need fixing." There has been barely a peep, however, about the ethical issues inherent in Swift’s harebrained scheme.

There are, by some estimates, more than 300,000 problem gamblers in Massachusetts. Given that the state enjoys a virtual monopoly on gambling in the area — at least on widely available, legal forms of gambling — we can assume that a large number of these problem gamblers have a problem with the lottery. The $864 million that the enterprise doled out to local cities and towns last year, then, comes at a terrible cost: broken homes, depression, and increased crime. As David Nibert points out in his Hitting the Lottery Jackpot: State Governments and the Taxing of Dreams (Monthly Review Press, 2000), "states with lotteries had a rate of property crimes about 3 percent higher than states without, a statistically significant finding."

"Cities and towns need this money," insisted Richard Gregorio, vice-president of the Massachusetts Association of Town Finance Committees, "as much as they can get." Yes, but so do the growing legions of dupes who end up shelling out a 10-spot every time they go to their local convenience store to buy a carton of milk. The fact is, the people who play the lottery are overwhelmingly the people who can least afford to. Any attempt to wring more money from them in the name of political expediency (i.e., the avoidance of raising taxes) is unconscionable.

But aren’t we being a little harsh here? After all, as we are constantly told, the Mass State Lottery, with a 71 percent payout, is the most "generous" state lottery in the US. In his coverage of the Swift proposal, Globe staffer Rick Klein adopted a press-release tone to report this fact, gushing, "[T]he state lottery made 88 players into millionaires [last year]. And one in five of its wildly popular scratch tickets is a winner, with the odds even better in some games."

On the surface, Klein got it right. But the figures he puts forward are misleading. As long-time scratchers know, this one-in-five business means that if you buy five $2 scratch tickets, you may get one $2 winner among them. Or you may not get anything. Or, if you are very lucky, you may come out ahead. In general, however, the chances of getting even 71 percent of your stake back are not good — those 88 millionaires the lottery produced last year are living high on the hog precisely because the majority of lottery players come away empty-handed. (While we’re at it, it’s worth mentioning the odds of winning a million bucks on a $5 scratch ticket: somewhere in the region of one in three million — meaning that, on average, you’d have to fork over $15 million to win $1 million.)

But let’s not quibble over statistical niceties. The fact is, the state lottery offers odds far less favorable than your average casino game — or bookie, for that matter. And now, thanks to Swift, the odds could get even worse. If the governor’s proposal were to become reality, chances are that fewer people would play the game. But those who balk at the decreased payout would likely be the dabblers. The chronic players who have already been snared by the oh-so-generous state lottery would keep on plugging away, with even less light at the end of their collective tunnel. Now that’s innovation.