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Month: April 2012

an extremely regressive tax

an extremely regressive tax

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The latest issue of Sojourners Magazine includes an opinion piece by Phil Blackwell, entitled Not Worth the Gamble, a response to the recent ruling by the US Justice Department to permit states to sell lottery tickets online.

I have always had a problem with lotteries, with citizen governments in the business of promoting gambling. What disturbs me most is not so much the questionable morality of gambling itself or even the social ills it may exacerbate, rather the failure of state government to do its job. A state lottery is no more than an extremely regressive tax, exacting an increasingly larger share of needed revenues from those on the bottom end of the economic spectrum. As Blackwell notes:

When we follow the advertising money, we discover that the lottery has been sold primarily to the poor and those on fixed incomes: The billboards are in the inner city, not the upscale suburbs. The lottery is promoted in such places with the deceitful promise that a buyer has a good chance to win security for a lifetime.

He argues “the state government’s dependence on lottery sales is cowardly …” — and lazy! —

… a way for legislators to avoid honestly calculating the real costs of education, public services, and infrastructure repairs and then calling on citizens to be responsible through a fair tax structure.

The job of government is to ensure fairness, to encourage healthy and productive lifestyles, and to nurture opportunities for its citizens to engage in meaningful and economically viable work. Lotteries undermine every one of these purposes.

one more state gives up the death penalty

one more state gives up the death penalty

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Yesterday, Connecticut became the seventeenth state to vote to outlaw the death penalty. May the thirty-three remaining states with death penalty provisions still enacted in state law be soon to follow!

Capital punishment can certainly be a hot button political issue, but it is difficult to imagine how a group of legislators voting to abolish the death penalty would do so to score political points.  Such a vote seems to me to be purely a matter of conscience …

  • feeling that the risks of a miscarriage of justice are too high;
  • feeling that the punishment is too often unevenly applied;
  • feeling that empowering the state to take life is putting too much power in the hands of fallible people;
  • feeling that the virtues of mercy far outweigh the questionable satisfactions of vengeance.

Just as mercy in a single human being is a sign of strength and character and spiritual maturity, just so is mercy in a human society a mark of strength and character and spiritual maturity.

Death Penalty Repeal Goes to Connecticut Governor

For Connecticut Nun, Death Penalty Debate Is Personal