26 The gig Sell for a "Purely Regressive Tax"
"Hey, you never know."
"Somebody's always winning."
"Somebody's gonna Lotto. Might as well be you."
"It can happen in an instant."
"Play Little Lotto. The odds be with you."
You bet, thought Brenda Kravitts, the odds are really with you in the state lotteries—odds for winning the big prize that make getting hit by lightning seem like a sure bet.
Brenda sighed as she leafed through the latest reports on what was surely becoming
one of America's growth industries. She knew that at least thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia now had state lotteries—and, with that, lottery advertising! And that resulted in very shrewd marketing fueled by estimated expenditures of nearly $200 million annually. No question that her organization, the National Coalition to Control State Lotteries, was fighting an uphill battle.
Addiction to games of chance—and the frequent escalation of debt, the families and friends lost—are some of the major by-products of these boons to state economies. "Lotteries," asserted a Penn State sociology professor, "are the most habituating forms of all gambling." And, Brenda knew, they are a severely regressive "tax" as well. As the chair-woman of the National Gambling Impact Study put it, "Most troubling to me…
are marketing practices targeting the poor, the notion of lottery gambling as a gateway to other
forms of gambling ... and pervasive use of disproportionate spending for lotteries among lower income and minority communities."'
As Dr. Eileen Epstein of the John F. Kennedy Medical Center observed, "Advertising feeds into the fantasy." The fantasy of what? Big financial rewards, of course. The freedom to have and exercise options. The thrill of beating the odds and reaping the enormous benefits. In its most crass form there was the infamous 1986 billboard from the Illinois State Lottery on Chicago's depressed West Side stating, "Your way out," and the . state of New York asserting, "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Even the trade publication Advertising Age recognized the problem: “Lottery ads regularly target the economically depressed, mislead consumers about their chances of winning and generally
glorify lottery playing as harmless fun.”
Well, there are some guidelines now, she admitted. Texas, for example, makes it a point that “advertising should avoid language and visuals that are directed to the economically disadvantaged.” Ah, but the ingenuity. The state of Virginia, for example, prohibits any spending for the primary purpose of “inducing persons to participate in the lottery.” Yet, a beguiling commercial character called "Luck" has, over a dozen years, attended countless public events and is clearly associated in Virginians' minds with the state lottery."
A somewhat disturbing side issue is that, in general, lottery advertising is not regulated by traditional federal or government agencies, since it was the governments that au-theorized the advertising. Even the ad business's most significant self-regulatory arm—the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus—has ignored the genre.
A former president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies seemed un-
concerned: “The lottery passes the two tests—it is a legal product and the advertising is
truthful.... Advertising is not in the business of protecting people from themselves.”
But, Brenda wondered, what about at least letting them know the whole picture? She thumbed through a recent study by two Duke University economists who found that only 20 percent of all lottery ads—and just 12 percent of radio and television spots pushing the lotteries—accurately reported the odds."
That was what Brenda's group was currently agitating tor—federal or state requirements that accurate odds be made a prominent part of all forms of lottery advertising, as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) now requires in statements about sweepstakes games. That would, she hoped, clarity that a claim that one's “chance of winning is one in
thirty,” meant any amount, not the jackpot, where the odds were closer to one in 13 million
Shouldn't the lottery players at least be confronted with an obtrusive warning flag?
Was that too much to ask for people who may “sell food stamps to buy lottery tickets”?
“This is not an advertising problem,” an American Association of Advertising Agencies executive has said. “The moral dilemma has been passed by the states' acceptance of the lottery.” What is ethical, then, is apparently to be equated with what is legal. Is it that simple? Clearly, Brenda and her co-workers don't think so. They contend that lottery advertising encourages addiction, particularly among those who can least afford it.
It would seem that there are two starkly contrasting views of "human nature" at work here. The representatives of the American Association of Advertising Agencies are apparently assuming a model of the sovereign individual, master of his or her own choices, and quite capable of dealing with skillful attempts at persuasion. Brenda and her organization, on the other hand, seem to be alluding to the vulnerable individual, a person relatively easily swayed by the verbal and visual symbols of advertisements, particularly those individuals belonging to lower-income groups.
Is there an ethical problem here, or should we simply let business take its course? (Advertising Age has warned that to "discount criticism ... or to overemphasize First Amendment 'rights,' is to gamble with future public support...”)
Judging by the soaring advertising budgets, advertising is apparently deemed necessary to (a) stimulate participation and (b) maintain it, particularly with creative new variations of the basic lottery pattern. And, by its nature, lottery advertising will promise more than will be delivered—e.g., for every big winner there are 13,000,000 losers. Does all of this result in a “greater relative burden on low-income families?” And, what, if anything, should be done about it?