The Lottery Shell Game

Play to Pay

To all those who buy lottery tickets and feel better about it because the state trumpets that it aids education with your ticket purchase proceeds: Hey. It’s a shell game.

It’s a compelling story — one that I bought too – which makes buying a ticket feel almost like a small act of civic service. But the inconvenient truth is, the money from lottery tickets doesn’t add a single penny to education.

The state has a constitutional obligation to fund public schools. Lawmakers create a budget that includes satisfying their obligation to education. The budget is then to be covered by tax revenue.

When lottery profits come in, the state uses lottery profit money to help pay the education budget, freeing up tax money for whatever else they might want to spend for.

Lottery money doesn’t supplement school budgets — it replaces tax dollars lawmakers would have had to use for education, freeing them to be spend tax dollars elsewhere, possibly political pet projects, or other politician priorities.

Effectively, you’re funding a politician’s pet project, and with no way of knowing which one.

This “bait and switch” lets politicians claim they’re supporting education while quietly shifting resources to other uses. It creates the illusion that buying a ticket is directly helping schools, while in reality it’s not increasing investment in education; it’s hiding the movement of dollars meant for education to elsewhere. It’s like a hidden pork barrel funnel, enabling politicians to avoid education budget requirements by masking the true sources of its funding. And it adds a layer of obscurity, making it more difficult for taxpayers to know how elected officials spend tax money.

This could easily be rectified - if the law required the education budget be funded by tax dollars.

Lottery revenues earmarked for education could go into a special account to which school administration has direct input and access, “supplementing, not supplanting” their budget, thereby adding to education, not funding its basics.

The lottery should be at least honest about what it really is - a convenient budget trick, a convoluted GoFundMe for whatever politicians didn’t feel like budgeting for.

But, maybe it supports education in a weird way after all: It’s a master class in political budget gymnastics.