Embracing Powerball

Gov. Baldacci has found Maine in such a tough financial fix that he felt he had to suspend his principles and support Powerball. But he is caught between a present culture in which most states and most people find gambling acceptable and P.T. Barnum’s still-current truism that, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Gambling is nothing new. God is said to have told Moses to draw lots in dividing up the Promised Land. Prehistoric man bet on black and white stones. Loaded dice have been found in ancient Roman ruins. American Indians were betting on painted peach stones when Columbus arrived. Benjamin Franklin helped organize a lottery to finance Pennsylvania.

Anti-gambling is nothing new, either. Columbus’ sailors are said to have thrown their playing cards overboard during an Atlantic storm. More recently, women led anti-gambling movements, complaining that their men were frittering away the household income.

Business has emerged, in Maine and elsewhere, as a leading opponent of state-sponsored gambling, since the millions that are wagered come out of the spending stream for groceries, fuel, appliances, home repairs and other goods and services. Moral objections still figure in the anti-gambling picture, but younger citizens can’t remember the old times when all gambling was illegal. State-sponsored gambling has given betting a good name and is said to have actually increased the amount of illegal gambling.

Maine lost its most vehement enemy of state-sponsored gambling with the death of James Russell Wiggins, editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper, The Ellsworth American. He called it a sucker’s game and a steeply regressive tax on the poor. He wrote more than 100 editorials attacking the Maine lottery and refused to publish stories about the winners. When lottery officials once called on him to complain, he finally agreed to print articles about the winners if they would give him a list of the losers so that he could print their names, too.

Where does Powerball fit in? It is the latest of the state-sponsored gambling games. Its promise of ever-bigger jackpots, up to $200 million, will cut into Megabucks revenue, but the Maine State Lottery administration expects the state’s share to increase by $9.1 million from a share that has been running around $40 million. Powerball brags of 16 jackpot winners last year, and says there 661 others who won $100,000 or more. The summary doesn’t mention the losers and the total they paid.

The odds of winning a Powerball jackpot are 1 in 120,526,770, compared with only 1 in 5,245,786 for Megabucks. A California State University professor, Mike Orkin, who says he would rather play blackjack, told CNN that if you buy 50 tickets a week you would win the Powerball jackpot on the average about once every 30,000 years. Put another way, he said if you drive 10 miles to buy a lottery ticket you are 16 times more likely to get killed in a car crash on that trip than you are to win the Powerball jackpot.

As unlikely as it is for any one person to win Powerball, Maine could absolutely depend on getting a cut of the take. That makes Powerball a lucrative deal, certainly, although not for the large majority of those who will play. They’ll become members of the ever-growing number of voluntary taxpayers who contribute to the state one buck at a time.