By L.A. Williams
Christian Action League
January 12, 2024
Planning to save more money in 2024? You’re not alone. It’s the most cited New Year’s resolution in a recent Statista.com poll, even edging out Americans’ perpetual promises to eat healthier and exercise more.
“It’s a noble goal,” said the Rev. Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League. “And believe it or not, the CAL has found a way for North Carolinians to save billions this year. We call it ‘Stop Buying Lottery Tickets.’”
Creech said the simple but effective savings plan occurred to him just after reading that the state’s residents spent more than $4.3 billion on lottery tickets last fiscal year. Across the U.S., the amount shelled out for a chance at an elusive jackpot topped $108 billion.
“That’s a lot of money that’s not being saved for retirement or used to pay off credit card debt,” says the financial advice website SmartAsset. It shared another sad statistic, this one from the New York Times: “People with a household income of less than $10,000 a year who play the lottery spend $597 a year on tickets.”
And all of this is happening while 60 percent of adults are living paycheck to paycheck, according to a 2023 report from LendingClub and PYMNTS.
“Obviously, many people who are struggling financially have never and will never buy a lottery ticket,” Creech said. “But imagine the good that could be done, the nest egg that many could have, with that $4.3 billion in North Carolina were it not frittered away.”
Residents in Wake County alone spent more than $350 million on lottery tickets, followed closely by those in Mecklenburg County, which reported just over $342 million in ticket sales. Other big-spending counties included Guilford, Cumberland and Forsyth. (Here’s a list from The Charlotte Observer in case you want to see where your county landed.)
But buying a lottery ticket helps our schools, right?
In its recent report, the North Carolina Lottery touted its record earnings and how it contributes to schools, pointing out that only 10 other lotteries in the U.S. have raised $1 billion or more in a single year for their causes.
“Every dollar raised goes to education and the investment pays dividends for students for years to come,” says Mark Michalko, executive director of the N.C. Education Lottery.
The “every dollar raised” really means every dollar not spent on lottery operations, advertising, etc., Creech said. In truth, for every dollar spent on a lottery ticket in North Carolina, roughly a quarter is going toward education.
“There’s a million better ways to help fund education than playing Powerball,” he said. “If we add ‘help local schools’ to our resolutions list, simple math shows that North Carolinians could have doubled the amount contributed to schools and also put $2.3 billion in their savings accounts, all without feeding what could become a devastating addiction.”
According to a recent report from WBTV, since the lottery was approved in 2005, lawmakers have changed how funds are routed to educational programs. Initially the law stipulated that 35 percent of lottery revenue had to be earmarked for education, but that was reduced when they increased how much money could be used for prizes. The lottery also originally funded some teacher salaries. But no more. Current North Carolina law applies most of the revenue to new construction, non-instructional staff such as janitors and bus drivers, pre-K programs and scholarships.
Some $130 million is earmarked for the Needs-Based Public School Building Capital Fund, which the Lottery claims is helping counties “all across the state” build new schools. A closer look at the data shows that just 28 of the state’s 100 counties received funds through the grant program in 2022.
But I could win big!
It’s no secret that most people aren’t buying lottery tickets to help schools. It’s the lure of the big jackpot that has Americans spending more on lottery tickets than they spend on music, books, sports teams, movies and video games combined.
But that lure is an empty promise according to experts like Les Bernal from Stop Predatory Gambling.
“Lottery games are a form of consumer financial fraud, similar to price-gouging and false advertising. Citizens are conned into thinking they can win money on games that are designed to get them fleeced in the end. If you pay for a pizza, a ticket to a sporting event, or a glass of wine, that’s what you receive in return,” Bernal says. “With state lotteries, what you receive is a financial exchange offering the lure that you might win money. But this financial exchange is mathematically rigged against you, so inevitably you lose your money in the end, especially if you keep gambling. Any success only comes at someone else’s expense. All of this explains why lotteries are illegal unless you run the gambling scheme in partnership with state government.”
Syracuse University mathematics professor Steven Diaz explained it this way in an Associated Press article: Even if you bought a lottery ticket for every drawing over 80 years – two times a week for Mega Millions and three times a week for Powerball – you would still be far less likely to win than to be struck by lightning once in your lifetime.
Learn more about gambling and its effects in North Carolina.