Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Breast cancer lottery
Not the lottery that women do not want to lose if they get breast cancer but instead Senate Bill 1 which will set up a breast cancer lottery. About a third of the state senate are in the Blue Room promoting SB 1. The new tagline is Ticket for the Cure. They are hoping to raise at least 3 million for breast cancer prevention programs. There is something sad about depending on a scratch off lottery ticket to raise money for smart public investment but when the state is broke, a lottery ticket is a new revenue stream. The thinking is that new people who do not currently throw away their money on lottery tickets will start buying these tickets in order to fund breast cancer programs. To me this is one more reason for a 4 percent income tax but it is nice to see a creative idea.
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2 comments:
Dan, Lottery and Casino revenues are an effective tax on the poor and uneducated. You know that. Let's not soften up too much on our ideals here. Tax the rich, not the poor. Pragmatism kills.
Oh, God, this makes me cringe even more than the lottery game to pay for veterans' programs that Pat Quinn announced the other day. What does it say about us as a society that we would rather fund programs by encouraging poor and middle income people to dump their money into lottery games than by simply providing these services through general taxes? What a sick society we're becoming.
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