The North Carolina Education Lottery is not living up to its name. The lottery needs fundamental changes in order to validate its necessity in our state.
The lottery, as it is now, doesn’t deserve the word “education” in its name. It is misleading and claims to serve a societal need that it’s increasingly failing to fulfill.
The proceeds raised from the lottery are supposed to help fund public education around North Carolina.
State law dictates that, “to the extent practicable,” at least 35 percent of the revenue go toward education.
But the amount of lottery revenue that actually goes to education has been falling. In 2007, 35 percent of the money made off of the lottery went to schools. In 2012, schools only received about 30 percent of the proceeds.
Although a lottery is effectively a regressive tax that mainly falls to the poor, proponents of the North Carolina Education Lottery claim that giving the money to schools offsets the moral and social problems a lottery creates.
However, if North Carolina continues to give less and less of that money to schools, then is the lottery really serving its purpose? Why brand the lottery as a benefit to schools, only to chip away at the money schools actually receive?
Now is a good time to take a step back and examine the lottery’s function in North Carolina. If legislators don’t want to commit to giving as much money as possible to the schools, that’s fine — just don’t mislead the public in saying this is an “education lottery.” Change the name and move on.
Or legislators could simply fund education directly. The state’s future shouldn’t rest on the success or failure of an institution that gives mostly false hope to the poor and those addicted to gambling.
