Nevada Needs a Lotery

As of 2008, when Arkansas joined in, a total of 43 states have amended or re-written their constitutions to allow for a legal lottery. Two protectorates, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands each operate a lottery along with The District of Columbia.

If you go to Wikipedia and search for states with lotteries you will see a concise list and the style of lottery game they play. There is also a site maintained by the American Gaming Association that displays a list of U.S. States participating in Commercial Casinos, Indian Casinos, Lotteries, Pari-mutuel Wagering, Racetrack Casinos, and Charitable Gaming.

All of these lists are easily cross-checked. A search for Nevada will show that outside of commercial casinos, the state has almost no presence in any other style of gaming. A search of states with lotteries will show quite the opposite. States with lotteries also share the wealth with Indian Casinos, Pari-Mutual, Racetracks and Charitable Gaming. It takes a bit of digging, but the diligent searcher will discover that those states with Indian Casinos, Commercial Casinos and lotteries are also states where the companies behind commercial gaming in Nevada have a strong presence. You will also find that those states charge far higher gaming tax rates than Nevada. This begs the question, why, if those companies can easily afford to maintain casinos in a state with both higher taxes and a lottery, does gaming in Nevada claim that Nevada cannot afford a lottery, much less a raise in the gaming tax?

Besides having a run in the Nevada Legislature, I worked for nearly 20 years in gaming design as a graphic artist. I learned from the inside just how much intensity goes into gaining a gaming license in states outside of Nevada. Many of the major players on the Las Vegas strip have effectively gotten down onto their knees and begged to be allowed to build a property in places like Gulfport, knowing full well that they would pay a tax upwards of fives times higher than that in Nevada. When Governor Jim Gibbons suggested taking a half-cent from the room tax given to the resort association’s tourism board and using it to pay for road repair, the association nearly had a stroke.

The careful reader will notice a distinct disparity here. Gaming has run Nevada for so long that it cannot conceive of any other situation. If this state’s economy is to ever recover, it has to rely on other sources of income, but it also has to use pragmatism rather than favoritism in its tax policy. If a company can prosper in a state with a lottery while paying a higher tax rate, than it can certainly do so in Nevada. A rough run of the numbers shows that Nevada could increase its tax income by a half billion dollars simply by allowing a state lottery. Approximately half that amount goes to neighboring California and Arizona each year because they have lotteries and Nevada does not. The reason Nevada’s Legislature has not voted to allow a lottery? Key leaders in the State Senate and Assembly have been told by gaming that their campaigns would suffer if they allowed that to happen.

Right now Nevada’s Governor is suggesting that the state has to slash the education budget by nearly 50% in order to balance the budget. He has suggested this without even once looking at the end result of such an action. He has also refused to consider any common sense solutions that consider the raising of revenue. Allowing a future generation to suffer in order to save the present generation a few pennies is not being conservative, it is being foolish. Allowing the tax payer to choose whether or not to pay a tax is common sense and fits right in with the thinking of the founding fathers. Allowing Nevada to have a lottery is a good first step.