I live in New York City, I frequent those little bodega’s (corner stores) to top up on my daily needs, often a cool drink, sometimes a sandwich to power through the grind of the big city. Time and again I wait in line for people purchasing ridiculous quantities of Lottery Tickets, be them Scratch Cards, or what seems to be a plethora of Lottery tickets for daily, weekly or monthly draws (honestly I have no idea when these things draw, just I hear a billion different combinations required by these people).
I used to enjoy the Lottery, and think fondly upon it as a tax on the stupid. But now I am thinking forward a little about my future in this realm we call America, and I wonder how all these people will survive in years to come. If we build generations of people who willingly squander their money on Lottery tickets and Scratch Cards we do get short term City and State revenue, but long term, we build a generation of dependents, with no savings, no financial wisdom and no hope for their future.
Last night, watching Hulu.com (since I cut cable to save money) I was hammered with some stupid advert about a ‘payday scratch off card’ where it encourages people to gamble in order to make up a new ‘pay day’ what shortsightedness is this? Why are we encouraging people to waste their money on such stupidity, and who is going to deal with it all when the shit hits the fan, and these people don’t win?
I’m also going to go out on a limb here, and say, based purely on the poll I have conducted by watching people in line in front of me, that the average consumer for this market is less educated, unemployed or underemployed, and spending money that is supported by benefits.
The NYS Lottery is an organization that earns revenue for the state, which is used to fund education – a noble and altruistic cause, but here are themain problems with this:
Revenue Leakage from the process of generating and funneling the funds from the Lottery, coming in two forms:
- Payment costs to external contractors to operate the program. 2012 generated 8.4 Billion USD (BUSD) for the Lottery; Prizes accounted for 4.1BUSD, commissions to retailers amounted to 1.2BUSD. In other words the guys in the Bodega took about 25% of the money for selling the tickets (that amount includes a much smaller percentage allocated to the people running the technology also).
- The government themselves wasteful initiatives on spending the money – ok this is the conservative in me, but here we have another layer of government taking the money garnished from the citizens, and reallocate it – in other words you have one government agency paying out people on benefits, they buy lotto tickets (because it is encouraged through media) and then another government agency takes that same money and allocates it to education…
I would love to know how much of that 8.4BUSD was originally government money, we know that 2.9BUSD is what is considered ‘profit’ from this, which then gets used for education causes…how much of that pays the salary of people allocating the money, and how much gets to the school system, that is another murky story.
Now, in addition to what I believe to be massive waste today – what is happening to those people who are spending their money on a daily basis on such gambling? How many of them are hoping for that big ‘PayDay’ and how many will not have it. Who will support them 30 years from now, when they don’t have savings, when they have again been lied to about what to do, I imagine the government might help a little bit, and by that I mean they will ask the people who saw through their advertising campaigns and did not spend all that money on the ‘Hey, you never know’ chance…
I say this, people are influenced by advertising, we all agree on that. If we are to be responsible members of our society, how can we agree to keep pushing gambling, using marketing tricks to confusing and betray the most vulnerable section of our society? Trust me, it will bite us all in the arse sooner than we think.
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