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“There has been a tremendous success in this state lottery that is just out of all stretches of the imagination,” said Thomas Caltagirone, a Pennsylvania legislator from Reading who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. “They never would have funded those programs independent of the lottery money. They would have been afraid to raise the taxes.”
In California, the state lottery earned almost $700 million for schools in 1986, its first year. The Illinois lottery twice saved the state from bankruptcy. Maryland’s earned $58 for every man, woman and child in the state last year. Ohio’s took asbestos out of school classrooms and put computers in.
Critics, however, say that just as medieval alchemists couldn’t make gold out of lead, lotteries do not create money out of thin air. They contend that the nearly $10 billion spent on lottery tickets in the United States last year would otherwise have been spent on food, clothing, health and entertainment.
During the first months of the California lottery last winter, Holiday Quality Foods, a West Coast grocery chain, sold more than $1 million in tickets and saw its food sales decline by as much. The chain discontinued ticket sales, explaining in ads: “Morally, wo feel it is wrong for us to offer our customers the opportunity to gamble with their food dol.1
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