Slot Machines in Kentucky

The issue is dead for now anyway, so I guess I'm a day late and a dollar short, but I want to go ahead and say it:

I am glad that the Kentucky Senate killed the slot machines at race tracks bill.

When I was 18 years old my very first vote EVER was a ballot initiative to allow the lottery in Kentucky. I punched the "Yes" button with absolute glee. Why? Because I understood at the time what I guess most people still don't, that the lottery is really a kind of tax, a tax that allows educated people to avoid it while allowing the less educated to participate in it. As Garrison Keillor once described it, the lottery is "a kind of tax for people who don't do well in math." And at the time I thought, Okay, let the idiots play the lottery and keep my taxes low!

I don't feel that way anymore. It is immoral for the government to make money by tricking the very people who can least afford it to play a game that they have statistically zero chance of winning, all in an effort to keep taxes low. And as an educator, I'm very irritated that the state legislature wants to tie the new slot machines bill to education, promising hundreds of millions of dollars for building new schools if the bill passes.

Here's an idea, though: If the legislature REALLY wants to help schools, don't pass a casino bill and instead raise taxes to equal the hundreds of millions of dollars it wants to give schools. The tax will be distributed among all Kentuckians, not just the ones who would play slot machines, and it will be LESS than the money spent on the slot machines. After all, hundreds of millions of the slot machine dollars would go to education, but hundreds of millions of additional dollars would go to the race track owners and to the administrators of the racing casinos. By NOT having the casinos and instead taxing people, the government would free up those other hundreds of millions of dollars for Kentucky taxpayers to spend on other parts of the economy: new cars, houses, furniture, horse racing gambling.

This whole idea to have casinos was wrong, in my opinion, a permanent bad idea to fix a temporary problem in the economy. And I'm glad the Republican led Senate had the sense to see it for what it was.