The Lottery. Historically one of the best ways to pay for any kind of public work is by holding a lottery. The fist recorded lottery was conducted by Augustus Caesar to repair the city of Rome. Later the Virginia Company of London would fund the first American colony almost exclusively through a series of lotteries, Ben Franklin was a serial lottery organizer to help play for public works in the city of Philidelphia, and lotteries were used to help rebuild towns torn apart by the Civil War.
But wait a minute - I hear you saying for the other side of the screen - if lotteries are so great why does the one in my state suck?
Well. that's easy! The way we do lotteries today is wrong.
In Oregon, the "lottery" is a lot of different games run by the government to add to the total state budget, the difference between this type of lottery and the type that helped to build is that the old lotteries were for ONE project at a time. Revolutionary War
Take for example the Revolutionary War: the Continental Congress did not have the power of taxation and therefore could not pay to keep the Army well equipt. So they did this:
Little slips of paper like that helped pay for the independence of our country and it worked because people knew that every ticket they bought would help the war effort, a war they believed in, and the opportunity for some extra cash, if they won, sure did help. More than gambling it was a charity to help the community.
That is how a lottery is supposed to work: one lottery for one issue, and if it helps pay for a thing you care about you vote with your dollars.
This is where modern state lotteries mess up. The state lottery helps pay for (in order of funding) economic development, public education and natural resources. With 1 percent of Lottery going to fund problem gambling treatments. If those categories seem pretty broad they are. Lottery act like any other tax meaning the government can use it however they please. One of the worst examples of this being Mesure 96.
Measure 96 was a statewide referendum that would have set aside a couple million dollars from the lottery to be used by veterans affairs. But instead, the VA was told that no change was coming because Governor Brown proposed that the VA budget would be cut equal to the new money coming in.
One of the reasons that the lotteries that worked for early America were so effective was because they represented a level of democracy, a way to voluntarily contribute to public work projects. Now, it's not much more than a tax on gambling addiction.
Right now the city of Salem, the capital of Oregon, is considering the construction of a new bridge and the hot-button question is how to pay for it. Will there be a toll? A bond? Will the state help? On and on and on.
History has a simple answer for public works funding, but because of the state government monopoly on the lottery, it is not available to the people who could use it the most, those at a municipal level.
