Could Gambling Eliminate Most Taxes?

Everyone loved the recent billionized lotto.  People lined up for blocks in the big cities to essentially contribute to government coffers.  And it was all very democratic.  Every stratum of society was in the cue.  Fewer were hurt than with families who drive off to visit grandparents on holidays.

      So why not channel gambling into paying for all absolutely necessary government services, such as plowing roads and fighting fires?

      One fire that still smolders after a century is the temperance union, whose nanny-state mission was to attack the symptom of alcohol because a few weak people at the bottom of society were addicted.  The same argument is current for those who overindulge in gambling. 

      “Let government save people from themselves,” establishment politicians now smugly assert.  Put compulsive gamblers into the same pool as fatties who eat too many glazed donuts.  Libertarians and social Darwinists may be right after all.  No one is forced to buy a lottery ticket.  The poor need only give up one pack of cigarettes.  Those who mess up should suffer, shouldn’t they, rather than be bailed out by social programs?  How else will people learn?  Let their families and churches come to the rescue instead.

      Even so, the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling makes a real point when it claims that “Gambling presents a bad example to our children. Gambling promotes the idea that luck, not education and hard work, is the key to success…and suggests that productivity is not important. Gambling sets up artificial risks and glorifies individuals who take the biggest, most foolish risks.”

     We should all remember this sage advice when we sit down to the upcoming SuperBowl, where a few Neanderthal athletes become wayward examples to youth everywhere.  Jackpots are jackpots, aren’t they, so why spend time reading books?       

     Recent wheel tax initiatives are also illustrative.  Bridge repairs have always been paid for by local people.  The big-government paradigm made the IRS the biggest tax collector on the planet, trickling back “grants” to the states, as though a benefaction.  State and local governments managed this transfer.  But now we pay the wheel tax directly, but grudgingly, not with the joy of an expectant lotto donation.

      Free of collecting the wheel tax, the federal government doesn’t reduce the annual tax bill one farthing.  It’s now free to pour yet more money into ever-grander diversity programs, bankrolling college faculty to assist government in developing new social schemes. 

     Won’t government do the same, in the long run, with gambling revenues too?  If we could magically increase every teacher’s salary in America by one million dollars, wouldn’t some state still place last in the teacher-pay rankings?