Aiding and A-betting

A Suffolk County New York bookkeeper is behind bars after admitting that she embezzled $2.3 million to buy lottery tickets. She faces jail and the home she shared with her husband and three kids will be sold to pay off a small part of what she owes her now former employer, a medical practice.

Clearly, this woman is ill. Less clearly, the society that sponsors the lottery that was her undoing is ill.

Don't tell me that if it weren't for the lottery, she would have found something else to waste money on--dogs, ponies, sports, whatever. And don't tell me that her crime expresses a deeper emptiness in her life. That's all true, and it's all irrelevant.

The fact is that the people of New York facilitated the destruction of this woman's life, the life of her family and, very likely, of her former employer. It is no excuse to say that she could have found some other way to facilitate her self-destruction, any more than it was an excuse to say that it didn't matter if a man was a guard at Treblinka, because if he hadn't taken the job, someone else would have.

Lotteries are, at best, a tax on the stupid, the desperate and the unhappy. Most of its victims are poor, but not all of them. I had a friend who was a lawyer (as far as I know, he still is, but I haven't spoken to him in a while). When his state's lottery had a multimillion dollar jackpot, he'd buy a couple of hundred dollars' worth of tickets. Was that a good investment? Of course not. Did he enjoy the hope of winning more than the loss of his money? I very much doubt it.

Do we have lotteries because people think it's fun to spend the time between buying a ticket and finding out that they lost dreaming about what they'll do with the money? In a pig's eye. We are addicted to state lotteries, because they are an easier way to finance government than instituting a fair and equitable tax system to bring in the revenue we need to run our states and cities in the manner we want. And that's sick. Cowardly, too.

If we are going to have state-sponsored lotteries, we should at least have the decency to limit the chances of abuse. The number of tickets sold to an individual by one outlet should be limited to four (or maybe $10 worth) in an hour (perhaps a day). If the compulsive player has to drive all over town to buy tickets, maybe he or she will buy fewer of them. Don't put flashy ads for lotteries in the media, and state clearly in all promotional materials--in type large enough to read (and on the screen long enough to be read in TV commercials) what the odds of winning are. Will we do this? What do you think?