And the winning numbers are ... 16, 18 and 21.
Adolescents dream of these three magic numbers. Sixteen is the age when teens can finally start becoming "adults" and handle heavy machinery all on their own, no more carpooling, no more catching the bus. It's time for most 16-year olds to drive in their new hand-me-down Toyota Camry. Twenty-one is the lucky number for most college juniors, when hiding the booze from your freshmen year RA or obtaining a fake ID from your cousin's, cousin's friend are all but distant memories. Bar hoping and over 21 club hoping is the norm. But 18 is the dud age for many. The only things 18-year olds show for being a year older are cigarettes, porno magazines and lottery tickets.
My 18th birthday is when my fascination with scratch lottery tickets began. I remember being in the convenience store that day where a boy from Hartford, Conn. became a "man." I stepped up to the counter relishing in the fact that I could by a lottery ticket on my own. Although I was a manly 18 year-older that could now buy lottery tickets, I would still be the poor college student the next year so I bought the cheapest ticket there was - the one-dollar "Aces High" game. The game was simple enough: if my scratched number beat the dealers, I'd win a prize, the magic Ace would win me an additional prize. I scratched the ticket with the quarter I had left in my pocket, and to my amazement I had scratched off the magical Ace of Spades. I had just won $20.
From that moment on I was hooked to scratch lottery tickets. When I was in a gas station or convenience store that had lottery tickets in stock and I had a couple of extra dollars in my pocket I would try my luck, never really recapturing my first and only brush with luck and the lottery that day I turned 18.
Now as I am approaching my 21st birthday and, writing this column, I have started to think about lottery tickets once again. As ultra-liberal sounding as this may sound from a right-leaning moderate, I believe state sponsored lotteries are an additional tax on the poor and uneducated. According to a Texas Lottery Commission study of Texas lottery players, people with a college degree spend three times less on lottery tickets then people with a high school diploma. What's more telling is that people with incomes less than $20,000 dollars a year spend almost two times as much on the lottery as people that make $50,000- $59,000 a year. As this and many studies on the lottery have shown people that are less educated and are poorer spend more money on the lottery.
So what or what's wrong with this, you might ask? The problem with this is the lottery is a form of regressive tax, which means that poorer people are taxed at a higher rate. In 2003, state governments kept and redistributed almost $14 billion in lottery revenue. Yes, the lottery revenue goes to fund education, fire departments, and local expenses, but the "tax" is wrong because it distributes an extra tax burden on the poor and less educated. Not only are poorer and less educated people spending more on the lottery, these people spend a higher proportion of their income on the lottery than the rich and educated. State governments should not make it their business to publicize, sell and run lotteries that put an extra burden on the poor and less educated that often times are minorities from inner cities. Lotteries are unsound tax policy that should be re-evaluated. Although tax revenue brings in billions of dollars for states, to supplement local budgets, lotteries are a way in which governments unfairly place the tax burden.
In Connecticut, the lottery's slogan is "You can't win, if you don't play." But a more apt motto should be, "If you play, only the rich win." Perhaps turning 18 is an even greater downer than I thought before; cigarettes give you lung cancer, buying pornography makes you look like a dirty old man, and the lottery has its pitfalls full of inequitable taxes on the poor.
Loi To is a junior majoring in political science and Russian. He can be reached at loi.to@tufts.edu.
