Better odds for students

Lottery can do more on scholarships

If, for a moment, we allow ourselves to embrace naivete, we’d remind readers the whole idea behind the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery when it started in 2009 was to raise beaucoup dollars to send the state’s students to college.

Looking at it from purely a dollars and cents perspective, the lottery notches a win. In fiscal 2018, the lottery distributed $91.9 million for scholarships, helping

33,025 students attend college within Arkansas’ boundaries. According to the annual report for fiscal 2018, the lottery has generated $781 million in proceeds since its inception. That’s on $3.9 billion — with aB—in ticket sales in our small state.

A lottery critic might argue the state could have raised taxes to the tune of $91.9 million a year to fund scholarships, dispensing with the need for all the lottery complications and leaving all those billions in the pockets of the state’s residents. Yet it was the voters who decided the lottery was the way to go. They accepted the notion that sucking billions out of Arkansans’ pockets with the false hope of riches was the preferred methodology. That way, it’s just the suckers — not the state’s business interests, property owners, wealthy or wise — who are footing bill.

Oh, we know: Give the people what they want, right? They got it.

We recognize some of that money was leaking across the state’s borders to other locales where lotteries predated ours. And it’s also true that visitors to our state kick in some of our lottery’s revenue. But the burden of the Arkansas lottery largely falls on players who make their homes in this great state, as they play the very poor odds in pursuit of a jackpot.

That’s why it’s important to make sure the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery is as efficient as possible — and that means getting the biggest scholarship bang for every buck people spend on the myriad games of chance.

Some lawmakers and critics of the lottery weigh success a little differently than the folks who head up the lottery. In the 2019 session of the Arkansas General Assembly, Rep. Jim Dotson, R-Bentonville, and Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, filed bills to require the lottery’s net proceeds to equal at least 20 percent of revenue in fiscal 2020. Those bills would also have triggered growing expectations in subsequent years until the figure reached 25 percent.

How well does Arkansas’ lottery do

now? According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, Arkansas’ 18.38 percent cut going to net proceeds in fiscal 2018 ranked it next to last among the nation’s 46 lotteries.

It’s not as simple as just waving a wand and diverting more of the money to scholarships, lottery officials say. Reduce the money going to prizes and fewer people will play the games. Reduce the advertising and promotion that draws lottery players and fewer people will pony up their cash.

If fewer people are spending less money on the lottery, the pool of money from which scholarship funding is drawn will shrink. That means a higher percentage might produce the same or even less money than scholarships receive today, lottery officials argue.

Undoubtedly, they have a point, if their point is it’s a balancing act. We believe it is, but there’s nothing to suggest 18.38 percent is the magic number to provide the perfect balance. If 46 other lotteries are managing to devote a higher percentage to whatever good cause their lotteries help fund, why would Arkansas be satisfied to be at the bottom of that list?

Dotson suggested another way to look at whether Arkansans come out ahead with the lottery. If a bunch of players suddenly give up the lottery, that will be millions of dollars that stay “in the pockets of poor Arkansans across the state. I think that is a win as well,” he said.

Dotson’s never going to be invited to any banquets for lottery leaders. But it’s hard to argue with his point: The real winners are people who don’t spend their hard-earned money on the state’s games of chance.

People legalized it, though. And they play it. The question is whether the state had struck the right balance between promoting the lottery and shaving off enough of the proceeds to go toward scholarships.

Surely, the lottery can do better than 18.38 percent.

Is the state just addicted to taking the largest amount of money possible from state residents and other gamblers? Should the lottery call the Problem Gambling Helpline? The lottery’s goal should be to maximize scholarship funding not by luring more people to spend more money on its games of chance, but to figure out how those other states devote a higher percentage of what they bring in to scholarships.