Guest Opinion: Willing to bet we can ax another scam — lotteries
by Dr. Gilbert D. Shapiro
Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Arizona June 20, 2006
The Star's editorial last week on common scams in Arizona ("Here's help keeping the wolf from your door," June 15) will surely prevent many people from getting ripped off. Sadly, however, the Star failed to mention the most blatant scam run by our own government. It is our state lottery and the multistate Powerball lottery.
It's ironic that these money-draining games are shamelessly devised, protected and promoted by the very government that the Star claims is doing its utmost to protect us from such unethical activity.
It is time for our state to realize that maintaining and promoting a lottery is unethical. It is capitalizing on the apparent gullibility of many of its citizens, of whom a significant percentage can least afford to participate.
Some years ago, I responded to an opinion by former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, who bemoaned the fact that low-income people were spending money on the lottery when those dollars should be used for better purposes. I told him that what may help would be if people could visualize what the odds of winning really were.
Because this issue has actually worsened with our participation in the seductive Powerball, it deserves to be revisited.
The current odds of winning Arizona's The Pick jackpot are about 1 in 4.5 million. How does one understand this concept? Let's visualize Arizona Stadium. It has approximately 50,000 seats. Ninety such stadiums will equal 4.5 million seats. Let's imagine attaching the jackpot ticket under one of those 4.5 million seats and then asking someone to spend a dollar for one chance to pick the correct stadium (a 1 in 90 chance) and, if correct, then pick the right seat (a 1 in 50,000 chance).
I sense that given the vision of 90 stadiums with 50,000 seats, there would be few takers. Yet, our state officials continue to tout the lottery as if it were a respectable game of chance that its citizenry should be encouraged to play.
Much worse is the Powerball. The odds of winning the grand prize are 1 in 146 million. Using the same analogy, you would have a 1 in 2,920 chance of picking the correct 50,000-seat stadium.
Lottery officials are clever to always spotlight the incredibly lucky winners in well-publicized, media-drenched celebrations. Although impossible to predict who will win, the reality is, according to the laws of probability, that there will eventually be a winner. If you filled every one of those 4.5 million or 146 million stadium seats, someone will be sitting in that special spot. But given the astronomical odds, it won't be you or me.
In our country, with credit-card debt between $9,000 and $11,000 per family and with only a small percentage of our population properly saving enough for retirement, according to the 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, our government should take positive steps to help its citizens. Eliminating the lottery would be such a step.
While our society considers gambling to be an accepted mix of evil and entertainment, there does come a time to "draw the line" if the odds in a game are so unconscionably stacked against a player.
I agree with author Fran Lebowitz, who insightfully commented, "I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not."
Dr. Gilbert D. Shapiro is a Tucson podiatrist. Reach him at .
