A vast, decadeslong societal transformation has been in the news lately — and it has nothing to do with climate change or election results or drag queens. Instead, it is news about state-run lotteries, which have altered the relationship between citizens and their government.
Washington’s Lottery surpassed $1 billion in sales for the fiscal year that concluded at the end of June. That means Washington residents and visitors to our state spent an average of more than $2.7 million a day on tickets for Powerball, Mega Millions, Lotto, Hit5 and various scratch-off games.
A “Winners Gallery” on the front page of WaLottery.com proudly shows several lucky residents — like “Darrel from Seattle,” who won $10,000. There is no mention of how much Darrel from Seattle has spent on the lottery over the years.
Which points out one of the problems with state-sanctioned gambling — for every winner, there is a battalion of losers. In 2022, according to the website, 63 percent of the money wagered on Washington lottery games went to payouts for “winners.”
At that percentage, gamblers paid $15,873 toward Darrel’s $10,000 windfall. The rest of the money goes to state programs, overhead costs and retailers who sell the tickets.
The Washington Opportunities Pathways Account — which funds college grants and scholarships, early education, vocational programs, charter schools, and other education initiatives — is the primary beneficiary among state programs. For fiscal year 2022, state programs received $217 million in lottery funds, with $176.5 million of that going to WOPA.
That, indeed, is a worthwhile investment. But the growth of state lotteries and the increasing reliance upon them has altered the social compact between state government and residents. As Washington Post columnist George Will once said: “Gambling has swiftly transformed from social disease into social policy. A generation ago, legalized gambling was rare and generally stigmatized.” The benefits of that change are debatable.
Questions about state-run gambling are not a matter of moral judgments; adults should be able to spend their money as they wish. But the process in which state governments promote a regressive tax should be debated. As the editors of Bloomberg Opinion wrote last year: “Unfortunately, what they’re selling is a numbers game with large social costs, persistent inequities and negligible public benefits. A rethink is long overdue.”
For generations, the American Dream stated that if you are smart and you work hard and you make your own breaks, you can improve your lot in life. The proliferation of lotteries has helped to bastardize that ethos, changing the American Dream into one that is reliant upon the largesse of a series of pingpong balls.
This, however, is only one damaging cultural shift. Another is government’s dependency upon lotteries as a revenue source. As The Columbian wrote editorially in 2002: “Once upon a time, governments developed funding through the strongest of human attributes — a willingness to help our fellow citizens, to donate a little of what we have to support the common good. Now, governments prey upon the worst of human nature, enticing the weakest among us to hand over money that, in many cases, we can ill afford to do without.”
With Washington’s Lottery now being 40 years old and — apparently — wildly successful, we harbor no delusions about its abolition. But the benefits of state-run lotteries should be more accurately weighed against their costs.
