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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Horsing around

Well, this would be a good start:

Inspector General David Thomas, in a report released last week summarizing the findings of an investigation into alleged wrongdoing by the Indiana Horse Racing Commission, suggested that the state should consider scaling back its subsidy, which was $58 million in 2010, to pre-2009 levels.

That year, the subsidy was expanded to include a percentage of slot machine revenues from the state's two pari-mutuel horse racing tracks, Indiana Downs near Shelbyville and Hoosier Park in Anderson. Those revenues also subsidize purses for their horse races. The state subsidy before the tracks opened was $28 million, or less than half what it was last year.

If state run, sponsored, approved and/or subsidized gambling can be called a tax on the stupid, what do you call someone who loses a bundle at the slot machines, which will then be used in part to subsidize the horse races that he can lose another bundle on? A Hoosier.

Comments

Harl Delos
Sun, 11/20/2011 - 12:15am

The state lottery is only a tax on the stupid if you're stupid.

The lady down the street tells me that she buys a 50c lottery ticket every Tuesday. She says that if she wins, it will vastly improve her life.

But what if she loses, I ask. Well, she says, I used to buy a candy bar with the money, and I stopped when I started buying lottery tickets. The candy bars were just making her fat.

How much weight have you lost, I asked. None, she admitted. Maybe I eat something else to make up for it. But I don't notice the 50 cents, she says. Heck, that's only 2/3 the cost of a daily newspaper.

So, I said, if lottery tickets are a smart buy, maybe you should buy 20 tickets each week?

Are you crazy, she said? If I buy 20 tickets on one lottery, 19 of them are guaranteed to be winners. If I buy one a week for 20 weeks, I could conceivably win 20 jackpots!

I don't know that it would pay Bill Gates to play the lottery - his life wouldn't change if he won - but I'm starting to think perhaps the state lottery isn't a tax on the stupid after all.

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