Brad Warthen's Blog

The tax on stupidity

I liked this analogy offered in a book review in The Wall Street Journal Thursday about why we so often call lotteries a "tax on stupidity:"

    'Imagine a standard NFL football field. Somewhere in the field, a student has placed a single, small, common variety of ant that she has marked with a spot of yellow paint. You walk onto the field, blindfolded, and push a pin into the ground. If your pin pierces the marked ant, you win. Otherwise you lose. Want to give it a go?"
    Thus did one mathematician describe the odds of winning a Powerball lottery. Is it any wonder that economists deride state-run lotteries as a tax on stupidity? Bad enough that the government is encouraging gambling; all the worse that it is encouraging such a bad bet.

You betcha.

And you thought Vegas couldn't get any tackier...

I'll give you a little rest from writing your own captions. Here's a real-life photo and caption from AP. Leave it to an operation with Myrtle Beach ties to teach tacky to Las Vegas. Maybe this could be taken to the next level if they made a "reality" TV show about it, but that's about the only way I can think of.

Bartenders gather at the bar area for training at Hooters hotel-casino in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Feb.1, 2006. Hooters' first ever hotel-casino, featuring 696 rooms and a 30,000 square foot casino with more than 200 Hooters Girls, officially opens on Friday. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A newspaper primer

When I saw this headline this morning, I thought, "What an opportunity! I can write a blog item extending and reinforcing the point about editorial independence that I made yesterday."

Basically, yesterday I had an exchange with a reader that gave me the opportunity to explain the separation between editorial and advertising. I would have mentioned that editorial is just as separate from news, but that wasn't the subject at hand. Then, lo and behold, the newsroom provides a supreme example of that this morning.

But before I could sit down and write the item, I received this comment (see the second one) from someone else accusing us of "hypocrisy" because the newsroom doesn't follow our editorial line.

Sheesh. You just can't win. All right, here's a primer on how this newspaper works:

News and editorial are as separate as advertising and editorial. When I see a headline I don't like, I've got less ability to do anything about it than you, the reader. You can hoot and holler and write an angry letter. I turn away and tend to my own business, because I'm not supposed to influence, or even try to influence, news decisions.

Am I complaining about that? No. Because just as I don't try to run their business, they don't try to run mine.

I really don't see why some readers have trouble understanding this. Most readers seem to think it would be awful for the news to be reported to fit our editorial position, and our most vehement critics are often those who believe that line is being crossed.

Yet now I have readers criticizing us because we DON'T cross that line, or the other line between us and advertising. Oh, well. I learned long ago that different people want different things from a newspaper.

Any other questions?

Fact gets in way of perfectly good post

A colleague points out a flaw of omission in my last posting, as follows:

She said that when the lottery was created -- over our strenuous objections -- we advocated that the authorizing legislation contain language that would prevent the state from doing what other states had done, which was to promote the lottery as a get-rich-quick scheme to an excessive degree. For instance, advertising in other states had portrayed people who studied and worked hard to make a living as saps, and lottery players as the smart ones who knew the way to fortune.

Well, I remembered that part. What I didn't remember that in connection with the legislative restrictions that we advocated, the lottery operators also would be required to urge people to play "responsibly."

But here it is, clear as can be, in state law:

The commission must promote fair and responsible play, including disclosure of the odds of winning, and must ensure that any advertising used does not exhort the public to bet by misrepresenting, directly or indirectly, a person's chance of winning a prize.

Fact noted. So now I will make these two points:

• First, if the only reason the lottery director is urging us to play "responsibly" is that the law requires him to, that means the situation is even more ironic, not less. Doesn't it?
• Second, I must apologize to Ernie Passailaigue if my previous words implied hypocrisy on his part. If he's forced by law to say words that sound hypocritical, then he's not the hypocrite, the state is.

But then, that was always the case. Ernie's just a guy doing a job. The guilty party here has always been the state.

Har-de-har-har-HAR

Did you see this in today's paper (scroll down to the second item)?

With the Powerball jackpot at $340 million, the executive director of the state lottery is encouraging South Carolinians to play the numbers responsibly.

Aw, man, I went and blew the joke! I should have set it up first, and then hit you with the punch line.

Oh, well. I guess I'll have to face the fact that Ernie's the comedian around here, not me. If it had been me, I would have come up with something lame about urging fish to do their best to stay dry, or curing alcoholism by urging drunks just to have one or two drinks when their jones is upon them. Neither of those works. I just don't have Ernie's timing, or exquisite sense of irony.

I love it when he brags about all the scholarship money the lottery provides -- always neglecting to mention that Jim Hodges vetoed a bill that would have provided the scholarships without a lottery. (Why? Because he wanted a lottery. Why? Because he was assured that was his ticket to re-election. Worked really well, didn't it? He's gone, but we're still stuck standing in line in convenience stores behind sad losers "playing responsibly.")

Of course, Ernie is a comedic midget compared to the genius who came up with calling the state-run numbers racket the "Education Lottery." That one makes us laugh until we cry, every time. People keep playing the "education" lottery, which means they never learn. If they did, no more lottery. That's some catch, that Catch-22.