It must be nice

Or: Playing with house money

THE STATE’S legal numbers racket, aka the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery, has been in the news a lot lately. The suckers are still there for the taking, and boy, are they being taken. Especially when the twice-weekly Mega-Power-Gargantuan hustle goes skyward. Which seems to boost the lottery’s take, even if the odds stay the same. (That is, the odds of you winning a life of ease are only slightly better than if you’d never been born in the first place.)

Last week the legislative panel overseeing the lottery approved a contract for an outfit called Camelot Global Services to develop a business plan for the lottery. Which made some of us pause. Who knew the lottery needed a business plan? Shouldn’t it already have one? The lottery has been in the lottery business for several years now. What are all those people at lottery HQ doing all day?

But now Camelot Global Services is to be paid up to $750,000 a year to prepare a business plan and implement it. Dispatches from the Capitol say the firm would also receive a percentage of any yearly Adjusted Operating Income if revenue goes above $72.28 million in a year.

It must be nice. That’s $750,000 plus a cut. (Part of that 750K, some $100,000 of it, is set aside for expenses each year. Now that’s an expense account!)

The director of the lottery, Bishop Woosley, said Camelot could help expand the lottery beyond its 1,910 retailers. The lottery originally wanted 2,200 shops selling its stuff, and “if we just increase by 100 retailers times $4,100 a week, that’s $40 million in sales that we can increase.” Well, his math is off. Way off. (As Casey Stengel used to say, you can look it up.) But we know there are three types of people in the world, those who are good at math and those who aren’t. And we’re not about to knock him for that, not with our math skills. The much bigger problem is that the lottery wants more and more, and will want more and more, and will pay big money to get more and more as the years go by. And more and more money will go to more and more consultants and more and more stores will sell this sucker’s bet.

And, yes, more and more people who can least afford it will spend their hard-earned paychecks on some nevernever prize. Instead of, say, paying the rent or electric bill.

Once again, the lesson from the lottery is clear, if we’ll just learn it: When it comes to scratch-off tickets, weekly drawings and anything else this Arkansas Lottery sells the public, the only sure winners are at Lottery HQ. The house always gets its cut. Sometimes more.