Every few days we see and hear another blazing headline of a lottery jackpot in the hundreds of millions and we’re also remind of how your bets are helping fund “education”.
You know, “for the children”… again.
Yet we also see those periodic pleas by state, local and federal officials claiming schools are in dire need of funding and teachers are so concerned about the state of education, they are willing to see hundreds of thousands of students thrown out on the streets unsupervised so they can get demand wage increases.
It kinda’ makes one reasonably ask, where is all that lottery money going?
The Lottery turns over its proceeds to the Virginia Department of Education. Then it is up to the Virginia General Assembly to determine how to spend the Lottery money.
— WTVR, 2/13/18
Well just from the sound of it, that’s where the games begin.
If you look at the payouts from lotteries to schools, you might be impressed by the numbers. In California, for example, all lottery donations to public schools from kindergarten through college, total $24,018,713,472 since 1985. Yes, that’s $24 billion. K-12 schools alone have received a total of $19.3 billion. It makes you wonder how some California public schools have had to hold bake sales to keep the lights on, doesn’t it?
In fact, in state after state, where lotteries send millions of dollars to public education, schools are still starved. Why?
Because instead of using the money as additional funding, legislatures have used the lottery money to pay for the education budget and spent the money that would have been used had there been no lottery cash on other things. Public school budgets, as a result, haven’t gotten a boost because of the lottery funding.
— Washington Post, 3/30/12
This has been a game that’s been going on for quite awhile, yet states and local municipalities are never held to account for their creative financing while hold their hands out, demanding more of our tax dollars… “for the children”.
While lotteries are often touted as a way to boost funding for goals like education, it’s not clear they actually achieve that goal. While state legislatures may start off with the best of intentions, in the long run they can end up simply using lottery dollars to replace rather than supplement traditional funding.
— Money, 8/23/17
And even while politicians play their shell games and generous amounts of money comes in, they NEVER seem to have enough because they are NEVER required to reveal any fraud, waste and abuse numbers; dollar amounts that had they gone missing in a private business, people would go to jail. Even when members of the public demand to know these numbers, politicians and their bureaucrats blow us off and we’re still forced to fork up more tax money whenever they want it.
California led the country in Powerball sales as the record-breaking Powerball jackpot soared to $1.5 billion. Officials said 25 to 30 cents of every dollar spent on Powerball tickets in the state goes to public education. Although the organization is proud of its contributions to public schools, California Lottery spokesperson Russ Lopez stated it’s not completely up to the lottery to fund public education.
“The California Lottery was created to supplement public schools. Not to totally fund public schools, not to resolve all their problems. It was to supplement their budgets. So we don’t do a lot for schools, it’s a modest contribution,” Lopez said.
— KABC, 1/14/16
Oh, sorry about the misunderstand based on what lotteries promote.
So, the next time you hear about this great, looming jackpot and how much it’s going to benefit “education”, know it’s just another lie told by politicians and those they employ to suck in more “revenue” that will never fully fund what they say it will.
Leave a Reply