(03-30-2018 04:37 PM)arkstfan Wrote: (03-30-2018 04:27 PM)AllTideUp Wrote: (03-30-2018 07:44 AM)TrueBlueDrew Wrote: (03-30-2018 12:13 AM)HeartOfDixie Wrote: (03-30-2018 12:12 AM)DawgNBama Wrote: Ahem, state lottery, ahem. Wake up and smell the coffee, Alabama!!! 
...a poor tax is not a magical panacea for the State’s ills.
Works pretty well for Georgia and Tennessee 
Depends on how you look at it...
Lotteries that supply funding for college tuition tend to inflate the price even higher. If the money is guaranteed then administrators will simply raise the tuition to ensure they get as much of it as possible.
I know that in Georgia, the standard by which the scholarship funds were meted out has been increased since the inception of the lottery because there were too many students meeting the initial criteria while the cost of tuition continued to increase. I believe the same has occurred in Florida and I would bet it's happened in Tennessee as well.
To be fair, Federal subsidization does the same thing so perhaps the cat is out of the bag on that matter.
The "Scholarship lottery" led to inflation in Arkansas. Legislature said you've got all this new money (which wasn't new money, just another funding source for student tuition) and basically froze funding.
Fascinating watching the schools deal with it.
UA in Fayetteville got aggressive seeking out-of-state students and now admits more out-of-state than in-state students.
AState has opened a campus in Mexico and a medical school in partnership with another school to drive revenue.
Arkansas Tech has staked out a spot in an open admission role and grown rapidly (geography helps).
Those who haven't adjusted are struggling.
That doesn't even come close to being the worst of it. What it really hurts are local sales tax revenues which usually fund a portion of emergency response, police, and school needs in cities and counties. It's not constitutional to charge a sales tax on a lotto ticket. Most tickets are sold at convenience stores. And sociologists who have studied the lottery phenomenon, as well as store owners, can tell you that it's not a a stupid tax on the poor as some may claim. The poor just simply take the dollars they would have spent on a coke, crackers, or other point of purchase goodies when they fill their cars, and buy lotto tickets.
The result of this is that the keystoned merchandise that raises the profits of the stores goes wanting in sales, and the store owners instead get the .05 cents per ticket that is sold. That's a difference of $1.35 in profits if three dollars is not spent on point of purchase items normally consumed.
What's more is that money is sent weekly to the Lotto Headquarters usually located in the state's capitol. There the proceeds are split with the state and the Lotto Provider's share is sent to a bank in the Northeast usually. For the economically challenged that means that a % of the money that once circulated in every town and city leaves the state without circulating which in turn drives down the revenue in multiples from the local economy (a phenomenon that happens with big box purchases as well). Most local economies in turn either cut corners or raise local property taxes to make up the difference.
In the end the very thing the Lotto claims to help, higher education, suffers the inflation that you mention, for the subsidized reasons you state. But it's the local grade schools that suffer the most because property taxes are relatively static and voter sensitive, and sales tax revenues are much easier to raise, that is until they get to be 8 to 9%. After that shortage of revenue for police, fire, ambulance, and schools usually arise.
So when lotto says they will help grade schools as they do in Georgia, that money is earmarked for classroom computers. Well if the issue is with bus maintenance it doesn't help. If it's low salaries for teachers then it doesn't help. If it is the number of teachers it doesn't help.
I fought it in Florida in early 80's and fought it in Georgia a couple of years later. I never fought it on moral grounds, but I did talk to chambers of commerce and business associations about the nasty side effects of having a lotto.
The lotto didn't really raise crime. It didn't really make the poor poorer, although it did cut down on their junk food consumption, but what it did was siphon off some of the disposable income of the hopeful middle class and as I stated, kill the local sales tax revenue receipts. So the stupid part of the tax is that it pits the interest of state representatives (usually through contributions to their reelection funds by lotto supporters) against the interests of the local districts they represent where the crippling effects of the lottery are usually felt the most.
If a municipality is over 50,000 in population the pain is usually less. If the town is under 20,000 it hits much harder.
So all the lotto does is steal a % of the states wages normally spent within the state and ships them off out of state, leaving all residents whether they play the lottery or not left with higher property taxes to cover the sales tax lost because of lottery ticket purchases. And no matter how you cut that, it's stupid as hell!
