Talk of the Town - Zell’s legacy August 12 2000

Would you support a tax that hits poor people hardest yet disproportionately benefits the affluent? Condone the sale of a product consistently promoted with deception? Endorse a government program that belittles hard work while encouraging a long list of societal ills? Think not? Think again. Because if you support the Georgia Lottery — and chances are you do — you’re saying “yes” to regressive taxation, “yes” to phony advertising, “yes” to all sorts of public-funded mischief.

Georgia’s new senator, former Gov. Zell Miller, is way out in front of you. He’s the patron saint of the state lottery. He campaigned for it. He fought for it. And he won.

In due course, thousands of others won, too. Some got lucky picking numbers. Others scored lottery-funded scholarships. But, while thousands won, millions lost. From the mountains to the sea, they threw their money away on the empty promise of impossible odds. And still they loved Zell Miller.

Years ago, John Lennon infamously boasted that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. When Miller left office in 1998 with an 85-percent approval rating, he was more popular in this state than the Fab Four ever were — and seemed to be giving the Almighty a run for His money.

Miller retired to his beloved mountains, I believe, with every intention of staying. But Sen. Paul Coverdell’s untimely passing last month transformed Miller’s impressive — if dubious — lottery-built legacy into a formidable political future. Eager to help his party snatch and keep Coverdell’s seat, Gov. Roy Barnes didn’t miss the obvious: Miller will be tough to beat.

Why? Well, Georgians like Miller’s folksy manner. They like his distinct brogue, his old-fashioned-and-proud hairdo, his steely-eyed determination. They like his reputation as a man of the people, slayer of the sales tax on groceries and father of get-tough crime laws. And yet those things pale next to people’s enthusiasm for Miller’s lottery.

Georgians are blotto for the happy side of the Lotto — the Big Game’s gazillions, funding for school computers, the HOPE scholarship. Lottery money and the programs it funds seem to fall like manna from heaven, with no cost. But there is a dark side to the lottery.

To paraphrase Rhett Butler, I hate to spoil everyone’s Yoo-hoo, scratch-off games and dreams of victory, but the state lottery acts like a bizarro Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. In Georgia, lottery sales are 2.5 times higher in low-income neighborhoods than wealthy ones. Meanwhile, the family income of HOPE recipients is $13,000 above the state average. (Making college an entitlement creates its own problems, but that’s another story.)

Lotteries prey on the poor, the less-educated and minorities. People earning less than $10,000 per year spend more money on lotteries than any other income group, according to a Duke University study. The same study found high school dropouts lose four times as much money on the lottery as college graduates; blacks five times as much as whites.

And lottery marketing is notoriously deceptive. TV spots invariably depict winners enjoying the good life, driving exotic cars and living in mansions. The millions of losers are nowhere to be seen. Instant games sport names like “Winner’s Streak” and “Instant Payday” when “Loser’s Streak” and “Instant Paycut” would be more accurate.

“It’s all about fun,” says the Georgia Lottery slogan, but, for many, it’s all about wrecked lives. A study found that 43 percent of callers to a toll-free gambling hotline in New Jersey — home of Atlantic City’s casinos — were lottery addicts.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the lottery is the way it assaults the traditional work ethic. As Harvard Prof. Michael J. Sandel has written, states “now use their authority not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope, [attempting to] persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune consigns them.”

A few years back, Sen. Miller published a little book about how he learned many of his formative values in the Marine Corps. Somehow, I doubt they were pushing something-for-nothing schemes at Parris Island.

No, Miller’s lottery legacy won’t haunt him in November. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t.

Contact Luke Boggs at lukeboggs@hotmail.com