Saying that the lottery costs a person $2 is like telling the cancer free that cancer costs them nothing.
According to a lottery ad campaign the “price of a dream” is only $2.
I get it. Tickets cost two dollars. Anyone can belly up to the counter at the local convenience store and plop down two bucks for a lottery ticket. It would be a clever slogan were it not for the fact that to suggest that the cost of the lottery is only the cost of an individual ticket is monumentally foolish.
In the first place, the price of the lottery is quite obviously the billions of dollars that society ponies up for lottery tickets. But the cost of the lottery is far more than the sum of tickets purchased. There is not a community in America without those addicted to gambling. And the price of gambling addictions is many orders of magnitude greater than $2. Daily Finance reports:
When it comes to severity, America’s gambling addiction isn’t too far behind the nation’s drug problem, and it’s growing. In 2007, Americans lost more than $92 billion gambling, about nine times what they lost in 1982, and almost 10 times more than what moviegoers in the U.S. spent on tickets that same year, says Sam Skolnik, author of the newly released book High Stakes: The Rising Cost of America’s Gambling Addiction, and a poker player who knows firsthand how gambling can lead to financial problems. In 2005, an estimated 73 million Americans patronized one of the country’s 1,200 casinos, card rooms or bingo parlors — 20 million more than just five years earlier, says Skolnik. (Read the whole article here).
There are countless stories of addicts cleaning out their children’s college funds or losing their homes while financing their attempts to win the lottery. Others lose businesses:
“My cousin and I started a small business in 2003 and grew it to $3.5 million in revenues before his gambling addiction brought it to its knees,” says David Winter (not his real name). “He had always enjoyed gambling, but the purchase of a new home in 2006 — with a much larger mortgage payment — must have flipped a switch. It wasn’t until 2010, that we discovered he had developed an online poker addiction that resulted in almost a million dollars being taken out of the business — money that was supposed to go towards paying state and local tariffs, the FCC, and the IRS for business and personal taxes.” (Read the whole article here).
So why is an insulting ad campaign that says that the price of a dream is only $2 so effective?
Part of the answer is that most in our culture are so radically individualistic that they compute the cost of something as the amount each person pays. But we are not islands unto ourselves. We are bound together. And what costs mankind costs each of us.
If you told people who are cancer free that cancer costs them nothing, you would quickly hear stories of how personal loss had affected them even though they did not have cancer. Tell a young lady whose mother died of breast cancer that cancer is free for her. See how that goes.
Or, if you suggested that the price of the war in Afghanistan is free to those who are not deployed, you would hear emotional accounts of how one person’s sacrifice affects many others. Tell a community that has buried a Marine that the Marine was the only one who paid a price.
To be clear, the cost of the lottery is different than that of cancer or war. Having said that, the cost of our national gambling addiction is just as real as the cost of cancer.
Many of us have never bought a lottery ticket in our lives. But make no mistake, we are bound together and we all pay. The lottery costs everyone. The price is dreams shattered, not dreams realized.
