LITTLE ROCK — CAN IT REALLY be happening so fast? It's coming next week? Next week? Gosh, it seems like only yesterday we were screaming bloody murder, or at least bloody misdemeanor, about the coming Arkansas lottery. Now it's almost upon us. How time and prudence fly.
But, hey, in this state, the people rule. Or are supposed to. Heck, it's the state motto. And the people voted to create a lottery that will take money largely from the poorest among us, and redistribute much of it to pay college tuition for high-school graduates. Another big hunk of the lottery's money is already being spent to pay six-figure salaries for a covey of people from South Carolina, but that's another editorial. (Thank you, Bill Halter.)
When this lottery thing was first being tossed around, a lot of folks who know how these things work, or rather don't work, were skeptical. Would the Ledge just take a lot of the money once budgeted for higher education and college scholarships, and use it instead to finance tunnels at the state Capitol and other pet projects, trusting that the proceeds from the lottery would makeup the difference?
That way, the new state lottery wouldn't really increase the money available for college scholarships in Arkansas. A lot would depend on whether the estimates of how much money the lottery will make turn out to be too high or too low. We've heard-tell the state could rake in $55 million to $120 million a year. Talk about widely varying estimates. There's a lot of room there for the Ledge to play fiscal games.
LOTTERIES have been called a voluntary tax on the poor and ignorant. How many Arkansans would treat buying a lottery ticket not as a form of entertainment, but as a last, desperate gamble, or, even stranger, a solid investment? And which businesses would suffer the most as entertainment dollars were spent on the lottery? Movie theaters? Bowling alleys? Bookstores? What a tangled web. (Thank you again, Bill Halter.)
Now lawmakers are being warned about another potential problem: What if the state's colleges raised their tuition rates, and eat up all that scholarship money? Universities need cash, too. To hear college presidents tell it, they needmore of it just about every year. What if the Arkansas lottery gave students X-dollars more each year in scholarships, but colleges just raised tuition by the same X-dollars each year? It'd be a wash-out.
A senior research specialist for the Bureau of Legislative Research (now that's an impressive title) says other states have seen students' expenses increase in tandem with the proceeds from their lotteries, supposedly created to help students. The researcher, Brent Benda, told lawmakers last week that some states have seen tuition and feesjump after the lottery money started rolling in. For bad example, South Carolina. Which happens to be where a lot of the aforesaid covey of folks running Arkansas' lottery learned their craft.
Mr. Benda told the Arkansas Legislative Council that colleges and universities in the Palmetto State raised tuition and fees by 13.4 percent in the two years before that state's lottery began in 2001. In the two years afterward, tuition and fees jumped 41.2 percent. My, what a coincidence.
If the money's there and available, why wouldn't colleges raise tuition? So what if students have to borrow the same amount they always did, or work two jobs to afford college, if they can afford it at all? The students would become just a conduit for more money for the colleges. They'd wind up paying as much in tuition and fees as they do now.
HAPPILY, this state's lawmakers are saying many of the right things these days. Jimmy Jeffress, the state senator from Crossett, says colleges should resist the urge to start new programs. Bill Abernathy, a state representative from Mena, says he wants higher education to be more cost-efficient. Conclusion: Nothing is easier to produce at this early stage of the lottery's development than a lot of good advice. Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil's Dictionary, defined advice as "The smallest current coin."
Give it a couple of years. It'll take that long to see how many university presidents decide they need another new building, or a new computer system, or a new field house for the football team, or some other Latest Thing, and, you guessed it, the way to get it is to raise tuition rates. Why not? Lots of students are getting these new scholarships from the lottery; they can afford the new, higher rates.
Most folks already know the lottery is a racket. If by 2011 and 2012, tuition fees at the state's colleges and universities are rising in step with the lottery's proceeds, it'll be clear who else has joined the racket.
It's long been observed, at least since the rage for state lotteries tore through the Southern states in the latter part of the 19th Century, that lotteries corrupt. And they do so in ever widening circles. A lottery that was created to serve students and the state's future may wind up doing little for students, tempting institutions of higher education to play low games with their tuition rates, and in the end not doing very much for the state or anyone else. Except of course those who have cushy jobs running the lottery itself or feeding off contracts with it.
It's an old, established pattern of organizational politics: Any new institution will serve its own interests first and sometimes only, rather than the purposes for which it was created. A government-run health-care system, anyone?
Editorial, Pages 16 on 09/24/2009