In Our View: Where Were Lottery Losers?

Where were the losers?

As Lisa and Everett Quam of suburban Seattle were paraded in front of the cameras last week, celebrated by the media and by lottery officials for “winning” a $90 million Powerball jackpot, the most important question remained unanswered: Where were the losers?

After all, many people gambled and lost on the multistate Powerball drawing while boosting the jackpot. After all, many people lose every week on all manner of lottery games as governments feast at the trough of regressive taxation. After all, the state of Washington had more than $595 million in lottery sales for fiscal year 2014 while paying out $372 million in “winnings.”

As simple math tells us, there are plenty of losers when it comes to state-sanctioned gambling, and yet we never see those unfortunates called forth for press conferences and celebrations. The Quams were greeted with cakes and banners and lottery employees wearing “$90 million jackpot” T-shirts, ignoring the fact that a more appropriate slogan might have been “Washingtonians gambled away millions of dollars and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

None of this, of course, is the fault of the Quams, who seem to be a genial pair of suddenly-retired Boeing workers from Auburn. They said they will use the money to pay off their children’s student loans, repair their house, and buy homes for their kids. They even had picked out a new Subaru Forester and said they will purchase their first smartphones.

It is difficult, indeed, to not be happy for the Quams and their newfound life-changing wealth. But it is impossible to ignore the damage perpetrated by state-run lotteries. As columnist George Will long ago noted, “Gambling has swiftly transformed from social disease into social policy. A generation ago, legalized gambling was rare and generally stigmatized.” Those days are long gone, as demonstrated by the fact that the Powerball jackpot won by the Quams involves 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Nearly every state in the union taps into the Powerball windfall in addition to its own lottery games as a means of generating revenue.

This is problematic for several reasons. Among them is the new American ethos that luck is the primary requirement for wealth. For generations, the American Dream stated that if you are smart and you work hard and you make your own breaks, you can improve your lot in life. The proliferation of lotteries has helped to bastardize that ethos, changing the American Dream into one that is reliant upon the largesse of a series of ping-pong balls. Want to have lifelong wealth? You don’t need to work hard; you simply need to be lucky.

This, however, is only one damaging cultural shift that has been eased along by state-sanctioned gambling. Another is government’s dependency upon lotteries as a revenue source. As The Columbian wrote editorially in 2002, “Once upon a time, governments developed funding through the strongest of human attributes — a willingness to help our fellow citizens, to donate a little of what we have to support the common good. Now, governments prey upon the worst of human nature, enticing the weakest among us to hand over money that, in many cases, we can ill afford to do without.”

The Quams, for their part, said they are infrequent lottery players and had never previously bought a Powerball ticket. It makes for a compelling story. But the losers likely have some compelling stories, as well.