万花筒 Kaleidoscope2007-10-11&10-13, 靠彩票支援教育事业？（在线收听）

Lotteries are designed on a simple premise. Scratch off the card, pick a few numbers and if you are lucky, a jackpot. Just buy more tickets and spend more money and you can recapture that initial thrill of the bouncing ball. It’s so easy that most people don’t realize that the numbers don’t always add up. And even state governors can find themselves tempted.

It takes revenue. And I’m not talking about pocket change we find under the seats of the couches. Trust me, I’ve been there, and I’ve gotten all that.

In 2001, in his first term in office, North Carolina governor Mike Easley pitched the lottery as a quick fix for its cash-starved public schools.

And if anyone here, or anyone in the whole wild world has better idea another way to find four , five hundred million dollars for education, then I'm open to it, show me the money.

At the time, North Carolina was one of the last states in the Bible Belt without a lottery. And governor Easley made that the centerpiece of his administration to the point where it became a running joke in his second state of the state address in 2005

So where do we get those resources? Is there something, some source of revenue that we are overlooking? Something that 42 other states have and we don’t have?

For 30 years, US politicians have used lotteries to pay for public programs like education to avoid increasing taxes. Governor Easley didn’t wanna be the exception.

Since I delivered the first state of the state address, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone in education to South Carolina , Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee. Our people are playing the lottery, we just need to decide which schools we wanna fund. Other states', or ours, I'm for funding our schools.

But there was massive political resistance from conservative lawmakers opposed to state-sponsored gambling. My personal feeling was that it was just not the sort of thing that North Carolina ought to be doing. State senator, Phil Berger led the republican opposition against the lottery bill. The thought that though the government was promoting a way that people could be quick" successful "by not working hard, by not taking care of themselves, by not being frugal , seems to me, to be all the wrong massages for the government to be sending.

For more than a decade, a unique coalition of religious conservatives and progressive activists defeated numerous attempts to bring a lottery to the Tar Heel state. But in August 2005, after intense political wrangling, the governor got his wish. By the margin of a single vote, The North Carolina education lottery was created. But governor Easley would find that the lottery was not the simple answer he was looking for. And a unique examination of documents from state lotteries across the country, the New York Times has discovered that lotteries are not a windfall for schools, while lotteries do contribute millions to public programs. State lotteries have largely failed to yield the huge financial returns initially promised for these programs. On average, states recoup only about 30 cents out of every dollar spent on lottery tickets, the rest, goes to overhead and prizes. Still, North Carolina had high hopes for its new education lottery.

Any, most of us felt that the lottery would bring in 400 million plus dollars a year that could be allocated among various educational programs.