November 03, 2003
Lottery no help for Florida schools
Sticking with the education theme, here’s Howard Troxler on the lottery and Florida schools:
THE LOTTERY WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BUILD SCHOOLS.Posted by Norwood at November 3, 2003 11:54 AMThe fact that lottery money is building schools at all is not something to brag about. It is something to be ashamed of.
The lottery was promised to the people of Florida as a way to "enhance" education. Every dollar, we were told in the 1986 campaign, was supposed to be an extra bonus, gravy for the kids of Florida, on top of what we were already spending.
Instead, here is the truth:
Education is worse off in Florida since the lottery began.
Education got almost 61 percent of Florida's general revenue in 1986-87, the year the voters approved the lottery. Today, it is getting only 53 percent.
The lottery provided the Legislature an excuse to take away from education. While lottery dollars came in the front door, the Legislature took away dollars out the back door.
......Until 1997, we kept up the pretense that the lottery was supposed to "enhance" schools. But that year, Democrats and Republicans got together and decided they could not resist taking lottery money for construction.
Led by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, they created a program called "Classrooms First" (heck, who could be opposed to that?) that would use lottery money to pay off construction bonds. Today, $180-million a year goes to paying off that debt.
Another big use of lottery money is to pay for the state's "Bright Futures" scholarships, which are based on academic merit. It is interesting, and typical, that Florida would use a lottery for such a purpose - relying on ticket sales, which come disproportionately from poor people, to pay for academic scholarships, which go disproportionately to the better-off.
In essence, we are relying on poorer suckers to pay everybody else's freight. Don't worry, it's working just fine.
