As Mississippi lawmakers convene in special session today to finally come up with a plan to address their long neglect of this state’s roads and bridges, look for their solution to be a half-baked one.
When Gov. Phil Bryant and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves took the most sensible way to generate the money — raising the tax on fuel — off the table, that only left cobbling together a bunch of less predicatable and at least one morally suspect choice.
The plan — assuming Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn work out their differences — is most likely going to include creating a state lottery, using proceeds from the recently implemented tax on sports betting, borrowing some money and giving cities and counties a share of the internet tax.
Even with all that tossed into the “salad bowl” of infrastructure funding, the state is looking at around $200 million extra a year — half for the cities and counties, half for the Department of Transportation.
A hundred million dollars a year from now into the indefinite future is about one-fourth of what MDOT and the Mississippi Economic Council, the state’s chamber of commerce, has said it will take MDOT to catch up on all the repair and maintenance that hasn’t been done because of lack of funding.
The most disappointing aspect of this special session, though, is that a very real need — road and bridge work — is creating cover for a really bad idea: the lottery.
A lottery is a terribly inefficient way to raise money. Last year, Gunn, who reportedly is going to cave on this issue, just as Bryant has done, had a study committee research how well other states did with their lotteries. It found in its sampling that on average for every dollar spent on lottery tickets, the states ended up netting just 28 cents. In other words, a state had to spend 72 cents to make 28 — a return that is about 250 times worse than a straightforward tax increase.
Furthermore, lotteries cannibalize from other sources of state revenue. The majority of people who buy lottery tickets are of limited disposable income. The money they spend on trying to strike it rich is money they don’t have for food, clothing and other taxable purchases.
But the most compelling reason of all not to enact a lottery is that it turns the state into a cheap hustler — a con man who takes advantage of the weaknesses of the poor and undereducated and makes them even poorer.
Using crumbling roads and closed bridges as an excuse to swindle the most vulnerable in this state — even if they are lining up to be swindled — is unconscionable.
