lottery tirade

I think it's called a hope program in Georgia.  The idea is, students who receive over a B average are eligible for a college scholarship.  So far so good right?  Let's study the program a bit more in depth.

The scholarship is pretty much funded by lottery.  A lion's share of students receiving scholarships are white, and majority of people buying lottery are either blacks or Latinos.  These ethnic minorities, who tend to be, statistically speaking, poor, were paying tuition fees for white kids, most of whom were able to afford college education.

People don't buy lottery because they're stupid.  Well, some people are stupid, but most buy the lottery because they're either desperate or addicted.  Lottery system is effectively a voluntary tax on the poor, and criticism should rightly be placed on cash strapped state governments looking for extra income.  Lottery used to be spent solely for education to rationalize its motive and help people sleep at night, but it is increasingly being spent on whatever funds necessary, like in the state of Missouri.  The program is bound to corrupt.

The quickest and the most effective way to increase income on a lottery is to lower the probability and increase the jackpot.  All you need to do is to add one more ball (like they did in power ball, which is sinister and ingenious at the same time), and the the odds of winning will increase astronomically, from one in 16 million to roughly about one in 75 million.  This is the power of exponential function (also known as compounding interest).  I'll write more about this later.

The most vulnerable in our society often do not have the ability to protect themselves.  It is our moral duty to stop exploiting them.

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Does this mean I'm against college education?  hardly.  If we used our resources wisely, we wouldn't need voluntary poor tax to fund our education.