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Lottery money shifted to bills (http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/mar/04/lottery-money-shifted-to-bills/news/ - broken link)
Quote:
Perdue said last week that she would use $87.6 million in lottery profits to ensure that there is money available in the state's day-to-day operating accounts to pay the bills through mid-April. Legislators who voted for the lottery law say they are frustrated by the decision, even though they know she made it while facing the state's worst fiscal emergency in a generation.
From day 1, the state education lootery was designed not to benefit the schools, but yet another way to pick the pockets of North Carolinian's. The first lootery dollar given to the schools was simply to replace the dollar now withheld from the general fund and normally given to the schools.
But if you are really bad at math, continue to pay the tax on those that are bad at math. I'm not a mathematician, but I'm good enough to figure out that the only winner is the state, thus I choose not to pay the bad at math tax.
It's not such a big deal, really. It's like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another; you still wind up with the same amount of money. Would you feel better if they said all the lottery money goes to education, and then use tax dollars that would have gone to education for some other purpose? At the end of the day, we have expenses that must be paid and income from several sources, and assigning which dollars paid for which expenses is just a shell game.
Lotteries are a shell game and regressive tax .... always have been.
I'm not a prude when it comes to gambling per se, but I would feel better if the government weren't in the gambling business.
Lotteries, and gambling, take a disproportionate toll on the poor and less educated populace. IMHO the government shouldn't be in the business of taking advantage of that segment of the population.
And no, it doesn't surprise me at all that NC's lottery was sold to the populace to augment, not offset, the education budget but in practice end up as a zero sum.
All one has to do is look at the individuals involved in pushing through and initially administrating the "NC Education Lottery" and see where they are today to get a feel for the integrity of the program
It's not such a big deal, really. It's like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another; you still wind up with the same amount of money. Would you feel better if they said all the lottery money goes to education, and then use tax dollars that would have gone to education for some other purpose? At the end of the day, we have expenses that must be paid and income from several sources, and assigning which dollars paid for which expenses is just a shell game.
That was the original plan, substitute lootery dollars for general fund dollars that will no longer go to education.
Now the want to take even that from education.
Wonder when they stop calling it the "education" lootery, and just 'the lootery'?
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Lotteries are a shell game and regressive tax .... always have been.
