For the first time in its history, the education lottery funds were found to supplant instead of enhancing education funding. The Tulsa World reports the finding means the Legislature is required to put $10 million into the Lottery Trust Fund before it can appropriate a single dollar elsewhere.
Read the Tulsa World story here.
Does anyone know the difference between ‘enhance’ and ‘supplant’? It seems that the schools get screwed no matter what.
The state lottery is but a symptom of the real problem. Lotteries are a prime example of an economy that is spending too much, and over burdened with regulations to an extreme. In other words, big government.
If you look around the world, you will see that primarily, stagnating economies of Third World countries began promoting lotteries, in order to collect revenues from the less fortunate members of their societies. Central and South America, many countries in Europe, and finally hit the USA 30-40-years ago! Not o good thing!
The lottery has been a pie-in-the-sky fraud on the public from the get-go. People actually though lottery money was going to be the salvation of education when they voted for it. What a sad deception. Lottery money has seldom risen even to the level of 1% of the operating budget in most school districts. Meanwhile, the lottery has fulfilled its true description as a tax on the poor, making the poor poorer.