Here’s a Maine State Lottery ad that would get my attention:
Former President George H.W. and first lady Barbara Bush are on one of their occasional visits to Kennebunkport village. Purely on impulse, they stop into a local shop, where George whips out a $5 bill and tells the dumbstruck clerk, “I’ll have one of those scratch tickets up there. How about … let’s see … ‘Escape to Margaritaville!’ ”
Barbara, rolling her eyes, takes the ticket and scratches away the gray waxy stuff. George watches intently. And just like that … cue the steel drums … the Bushes are basking in a $100,000 boatload of margaritas!
Never going to happen?
You’re right.
The Bushes, and I admit I’m speculating here, don’t buy Maine lottery tickets. Nor does just about anyone else in wealthy Kennebunkport, where annual sales for the Maine State Lottery hover at a rock-bottom $6 per person.
For the real lottery action, we need to travel far Down East to the tiny Washington County hamlet of Waite, one of the poorest spots in Maine. There, the lottery machines spit out tickets constantly to the tune of $1,313 per local resident annually – in some cases consuming entire paychecks before they can even be cashed.
This and other startling information came to us last week via an excellent three-part series by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Written by Dave Sherwood and based on expert analysis by David Just, a Cornell University behavioral economist who has studied lotteries in 39 states, the series illustrated how deeply Maine’s $230 million-per-year lottery has rooted itself into the state’s fiscal bedrock since the lottery’s creation in 1973.
No big surprise there. But what did come as a disturbing reminder after all these decades is just how much of that cash comes from Mainers who can least afford to be goaded by their state government, week after week, into chasing margaritas that rarely if ever materialize.
To wit: Of the 10 towns where Mainers spend the most on lottery tickets, six are in Washington County, the state’s poorest county.
To wit: Scientific Games, the Las Vegas-based firm that holds the $8 million contract to operate Maine’s lottery, doesn’t have to tell us how it goes about doing so. Its entire 285-page marketing plan for Maine’s lottery is shielded behind the label “confidential information.”
To wit: No one in state government knows or seems to much care what impact the lottery might be having on the poorest of Maine’s poor. As state Rep. Louis Luchini, D-Ellsworth, who chairs the legislative committee that nominally oversees the lottery, put it, “They basically run their own business.”
And make no mistake about it, that business is rooted in addiction. The state is addicted to the $50 million that flows annually into its General Fund (the rest of the lottery’s $230 million goes to payouts and expenses), while the daily players are addicted to the paltry prizes designed to keep them coming back and the dream that someday, yessir someday, they’re going to hit the big one.
Sure, there are those in between who see the lottery as harmless fun and can easily afford the occasional $5, $10 or $20 trip down fantasy lane. I pick up their discarded tickets outside my house all the time.
But when Cornell economist Just juxtaposes Maine’s lottery sales data with its unemployment statistics by ZIP code and finds a 10 percent jump in lottery sales for every 1 percent rise in unemployment, you’ve got to wonder how much of that unemployment check is going to milk and peanut butter for the kids.
And since we’re on the subject of government assistance, how can so many in Augusta rail against the “cycle of dependence” created by social assistance programs on the one hand while, on the other, utter not a word against the state-sponsored fleecing of those same people for what little discretionary cash they have left to call their own?
The lottery boosters, of course, insist it’s all fun and games and nobody’s buying tickets with a gun to their head. Still, economic desperation is a powerful thing – and I’ve yet to see anyone smiling as they toss yet another pile of losing scratch tickets (might as well be U.S. currency) into the trash bin down at the corner store.
The point here is not that Maine should abandon its lottery outright – the Good Ship Megabucks has sailed too long and too far for any politician to stop it now.
But for the state to remain so willfully blind for so long to whom The Maine State Lottery hurts the most and how that harm might be mitigated is government at its greediest. Which, as even our most conservative friends would agree, is government at its worst.
And, alas, things are about to get even worse.
According to last week’s series, the Maine Lottery Commission earlier this year hired the Boston firm Fuseideas to come up with a plan to ratchet the Maine State Lottery to “maximum sales and profits.”
One problem: The lottery isn’t so hot among millennials, who apparently don’t understand a lot of the betting lingo and spend too much time with their noses buried in their smartphones to be gumming up their nails with scratch tickets.
The solution: a scavenger hunt.
Advises Fuseideas, “Kick off the ‘Scavenger Hunt’ for a package of lottery tickets and the search for the ‘golden ticket,’ which has an instant prize of $50,000. Maine Lottery would go to towns all over the state where there are Maine Lottery retailers, hiding a package of lottery tickets that may or may not contain a golden or silver ticket somewhere in the town. Clues to the location of the tickets would be given through Maine Lottery’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Once someone finds the tickets, they would take a photo of themselves and post on the Maine Lottery Facebook page in order to be eligible.”
Just imagine. A statewide frenzy of economically deprived Mainers, cellphones at the ready, scouring every nook and cranny from Kittery to Fort Kent until they find that one, ever-elusive $50,000 scratch ticket.
I hope they hide it in Kennebunkport.
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