A convicted bank robber on parole who recently won a $1 million lottery prize will get to keep the money, according to an Associated Press story.
Buying the ticket violated the Massachusetts man's parole because part of the agreement stated he could not "gamble, purchase lottery tickets or visit an establishment where gaming is conducted," according to the story.
However, officials have ruled he will get to keep his jackpot.
I'm glad for him, I guess, but I really don't like the lottery. It's just another way for a state to milk more money out of lower income households for projects.
I don't care that the lottery in Tennessee has generated a billion dollars to send students to college. And, yes, I realize that playing the lottery is voluntary.
It just strikes me as odd that we have a system that seduces people of limited means with promises of riches, and then we use that money to send kids to school who, in most cases, could have found another financial way to go to college.
However, this is something that the people want, so I guess I should shut my big fat mouth.
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2 comments:
Don't EVEN get me started 'bout the lottery. It is - if we're being completley honest - a means by which poor and lower middle-class individuals subsidize college scholarships for middle and upper-middle income chi'dren.
What I always found ironic before the Tennessee lottery was approved was this: State Sen. Steve Cohen, a Democrat who fancied himself a chapion of the poor and, ahem, less well-to-do, was the chief sponsor of lottery legislation. He stood on the floor of the Tenn. Senate hundreds of times harping about the "poor," and then he went and got a lottery approved. Irony, indeed.
That said, what really peeves me now is the fact that many state legislators want to lower the bar for receiving and retaining a lottery scholarship from a B (3.0) to a C (2.75). Thus, lottery scholarships are set to become not REWARDS for students who excel in their studies, but ENTITLEMENTS for students who do just enough to be, ahem, mediocre.
Very well put, joltin' ... the lottery is nothing but a tax on the poor and on people who can't do math.
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