Taxes On The Stupid

Pay Up

When I was a (had to be) remarkably painful to live with teenager, my mother would spend a few bucks on the lottery. As a single mother raising three kids on her own, it was likely one of life's few and good diversions for her, as a bartender who logged late hours to keep a roof over our head. She'd connect more than a few times on the three digit daily draw, and when that happened, she's share the wealth. Nothing too dire or difficult in that, right?

Well, of course not. But here's where I prove my stripes as a world-class pain in the posterior. Having always had a political bent for aspects involving class systems and how poor people stayed poor (yes, you guessed it, we were not particularly well to do), I had picked up what legislators called lotteries, in private.

"Taxes on the stupid."

Now, to be very clear about this: I'm not insulting my mother's intellect, either then or now. The same way I'm not insulting anyone who played and lost in the most recent spasm of activity. We are, at our core, nearly helpless to resist the momentary good feeling and day dreaming that hits when we've got a ticket in our hands, and the simple truths of the purchase are undeniable. Can't win if you don't play. It's only a trivial amount of money. It's fun to dream.

But what's not fun is paying off people who think you are stupid, and proving it with the payment.

So I made my mom a deal, all those years ago. I told her that the next time she hit the lottery, I wanted no part of the winnings... but that every time she played, I wanted her to give me a dollar. For whatever reason, she put up with this disrespect. And then I left those dollars in plain sight, in my room, near where she'd drop off laundry. (Why wasn't I doing my own laundry by the time I was a teenager? No idea, really. Probably because, as this whole story shows, Mom had the good wisdom to regard laundry as a welcome respite from putting up with me. Anyway...)

I was fortunate enough, as a kid, to have relatively steady employment. First as a paperboy, then as a gopher and counter person at a miniature golf course, and finally as a content provider at a pre-Internet telecommunications start up. So I didn't have to touch that pile of dollar bills that started piling up on my dresser. And when they hit a certain tipping point -- probably $50 or $60 -- my mom told me tht she wasn't playing the lottery any more, and I'd made my point. (She also refused to take back the pile.)

Since then, lotteries have only gotten bigger, with a spiraling amount of "news" coverage that just strikes me as downright unseemly. I pay my own taxes for being dumb, mostly through gambling with friends at a poker table or in fantasy leagues, or less often, in casinos. (It's still a tax on the stupid, but the difference is that I can feel like I've earned my luck in those games. It's a more fun illusion.) But I never got the lottery bug, because I've never lost the need to refuse payment of cynical political operatives. Or the knowledge that the only people who consistently get paid from this game are the ones working for the house.

Where this ties into the mission statement of marketing and advertising perspective is that we all, as professionals, make pitches to ourselves just to get through the day. Knowing why a pitch works allows you to counter it, use its power to subvert it, and maybe, in the long run, make better choices. Or, at least, better pitches.

Our world would be better without lotteries. Especially if we just donated to charities routinely, rather than believe the most over the top cynical political move of saying how a portion of the proceeds goes to a good cause, so losing in the lottery is just like charity.

And the trick to taking the juice out of this purchase, and keeping more people from succumbing to inertia the next time the pot gets big enough to make everyone forget the earlier losses?

Well, turning off the unpaid propaganda for it in the media would be a start. As would keeping in mind what the people who run the games think of the customers...

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