Some scandals don't involve illegal activity – they're just outrageous and unjust. Take gambling in America. Abetted by Congress, legislatures from 48 states now sponsor gambling operations and lottery monopolies to balance their budgets on the backs of their poorest and most vulnerable citizens – while basking in the virtue of fighting tax increases.
"I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged." ~ Roger Jones
But the kicker:
Clearly, America's appetite for what industry officials benignly call "gaming" has grown. It's all legal, so what's the big deal? Here's the scandal: In 1999, the bipartisan National Gambling Impact Commission found that 80 percent of gambling revenue comes from households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year.
More remarkably, players with annual incomes of less than $10,000 spent almost three times as much on gambling – in aggregate, real dollars – as those with incomes of more than $50,000. With the aggressive encouragement of state governments, US gamblers – most of them scraping by on limited incomes – had to lose $84 billion last year in casinos and lotteries for the states to raise $24 billion in new revenues.
Read the rest.
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