Here in North Carolina we finally got ourselves a lottery last year.  After years of trying the powers-that-be finally got it through by calling it an "Education Lottery" and saying that proceeds would go to funding public education.  The lottery is a reality now and it will probably be so for many years.

Personally I don’t care whether or not we have a lottery.  I’ve never played the NC lottery, but I used to play scratch-off games in Virginia every once in a while on a lark.  Some folks call lotteries a regressive tax on the poor, but I don’t buy the argument that it’s a tax since you don’t have to play it.  What I will mind is if the legislature decides to divert the money to something besides education, because then they’ll have pulled a bait and switch on the fine citizens of North Carolina.

That’s why I read with great interest this post about lotteries at  Freakonomics.  Even more interesting are some of the comments, especially the one about Montana that says that the education system used to be the beneficiary of the lottery but is no longer.  Honestly does anyone think it’s really a question of if, not when, the state legislature will eventually divert lottery money to the general fund?

North Carolina’s lottery has been marked with scandal from the beginning, which was nicely outlined in this Washington Post article. In fact a lot of what happened with the lottery led to the recent resignation of our soon-to-be-convicted-felon former House Speaker Jim Black.  Despite the attention all of this has brought to the lottery it will only be a matter of time, probably a couple of years, before North Carolina’s crooked-as-an-elbow leadership figures we’re not paying attention and diverts the money to something like tobacco subsidies or hog farm enrichment programs. The money that the lottery generates is just too big a cookie jar for our leaders to resist dipping into it.  It’s happened elsewhere already and it’s going to happen here.