Category: Rants

Life has a tendency to rebel against our attempts to make it unfold according to a schedule.

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Try as we might to think ahead and plan for the future, there are always enough unforeseen detours to take us off our predetermined course. Part of aging and becoming wiser is realizing that life gets in the way of the best laid plans. This is not to say that falling off the schedule is without consequences. New data is showing what we already know to be the case, at least intuitively: pre-Great Recession college graduates found jobs more quickly and earned more when compared to post-GR graduates. With voluntary exits from the workforce slowing to a trickle, young people hired in 2012 will also have a harder time advancing in their careers than previous generations. In short, perhaps it is unavoidable that the Classes of 2009-2012 will end up wasting two or three years of their lives doing grunt work until finding a decent job, but that delay represents a loss of earnings and a loss of professional capital that young workers will never make back.

While I've had the good fortune of being continuously gainfully employed throughout the downturn, this is one topic on which I think my example is somewhat illustrative.

I began looking for a tenure-track job in 2008 and found one four years and hundreds of applications later in early 2012. In the interim, I worked in a temporary position with all the concomitant benefits – no opportunity for advancement, low salary, high workload, no resources, etc. Compare this course of events to an alternate history in which 2008 was a modal year for the job market in my field. Not landing a real job at the outset has cost me, over this four year period, a conservative estimate of $50-60,000 in salary that I will never earn back (picture the value of that amount, for example, invested until retirement age) and a lengthy delay in beginning the long, slow process of career advancement. If I go up for tenure before I'm 40 it will be a miracle, compared to the more common practice of doing it in one's early 30s. Don't weep for me; I don't live in a cardboard box and I'm not going hungry, but the point holds that the delay in getting started in a profession is a costly one with both short- and long-term consequences.

There's no amount of elbow grease or bootstrap pulling that can make up for two, three, or even five years after graduation spent living in Mom and Dad's basement, making coffee for $7.75/hr, or "interning" (i.e., working for free). Those are wasted years, in the economic sense, that you will never get back. And this is becoming a disturbingly common experience for heavily indebted college graduates. Some combination of unemployment, substantial underemployment, or continued dependence on parental resources (if available) are the rule rather than the exception no matter how we slice the data.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this is not the economic cost to young workers but the psychological shift that accompanies changing expectations.
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Not only are things not improving, but it's getting to a point at which no one really expects them to improve. Failing to find a career or at least a decently compensated job is the new normal, much as moving back in with the parents now fails to raise eyebrows. Young adults enter the Real World for which college supposedly prepares them with a sense of fatalism and a stunted process of personal and social maturation. Moving back in with the parents, for example, halts the process of learning basic adult skills – living on one's own, cooking, paying bills, budgeting, and so on – that the school-to-work transition is supposed to encourage. Not only are young people losing income that they will never regain, but they are potentially extending an adolescence that already lasts too long in our society (with its college culture that encourages juvenile, irresponsible behavior into one's early twenties).

The solution is not specific to this demographic. Instead, their success depends on stronger demand for workers overall. While the weak economy continues to hurt nearly everyone in some way, it will be easier for those of us already on the train to hold on during the bumpy ride than it will be for young people chasing the train on foot to get aboard.

On Monday the Senate passed a bill, expected to be passed through the House and rubber-stamped by the President, to mandate Electronic Data Recorders – EDRs or "black boxes" – in all new cars sold in the U.S. beginning in 2015. Be sure to stock up on 2014 cars, which are sure to skyrocket in value among survivalists and the internet's legion of libertarian commandos.

I'm not one to laugh at privacy / 4th Amendment concerns very often, and such things should generally be taken seriously. There is a curious tendency for Patriotic types to obsess over the loss of individual freedoms only when there is a Democrat in office – It was all "If you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about!" from 2000 to 2008 – but for the most part I assume they are sincere if a bit paranoid. I suppose I could get more worked up about it myself if not for reality (75% of cars already have an EDR or EDR-like device, and the law mostly affects the format of the data already being collected) or the fact that I've long since abandoned any illusions of privacy when modern technology is involved. It's a war that was never really fought and, short of living-off-the-grid type strategies for opting out of the world, we've already lost.

There are plenty of people who will hear about this law and assume that The Government is going to be tracking your location 24-7. Aside from the misplaced anger (this is more about information-grabbing by insurers, not the state) there's the little problem that your smartphone is probably already doing this. And if it isn't, it's certainly capable of being used for that purpose. Ditto those neat GPS units that are fast becoming standard features in new cars, which are connected to a Department of Defense satellite network and could presumably be used to harvest copious data from your vehicle.

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Outside of your car, we already live with the reality of Google, Facebook, and all of our favorite internet tubes are treating us like cows to be milked for data that will be sold to advertisers. And we compound the problem by providing copious information (Account numbers, SSN, passwords, credit cards, etc.) in the course of banking, paying bills, shopping, buying insurance, and everything else online. That data's all secure, right?

I can't say I'm happy about the presence of another electronic data harvesting device in my life, but I can't be alone in getting somewhat numb to it. If someone – the NSA, State Farm, Google, the Illuminati, cabals of Jewish bankers – wants to collect information about my whereabouts they're perfectly capable of doing so already.

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Even if you ditch the iPhone, things like DARPA's terrifying Total Information Awareness project, which uses city-sized networks of cameras to track an individual's location based solely on gait recognition. So yeah, the technology to keep constant tabs on you already exists and we're going to have enough trouble fighting the big stuff in the coming years – CCTV systems, for example – so there's no point in wasting our time freaking out about things that are blown out of proportion and ultimately irrelevant.

Most children figure out how to get a rise out of people with shock value by the age of about three. We learn that when we scream as loud as possible all of the nearby adults will pay attention to us, or that when we say "poop" or take off our clothes everyone will laugh. Unsurprisingly, as we get older and/or mature we begin to understand this as a cheap, lazy way to get a response. Yes, a comedian can get on stage and talk about masturbation for five minutes and get some cheap laughs, or an artist can dunk a crucifix in urine and become a household name when everyone predictably flips out. It's a fine line, however, because many things we consider to be important or artistically valuable have some element of shock value. This includes countless films, books like Tropic of Cancer or A Clockwork Orange, and artworks as diverse as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Duchamp's "Fountain", all of which were banned at some point and debuted to considerable controversy. So there is a relevant distinction between things of intellectual or artistic value that are shocking and things that have nothing to offer except shock value.

I am increasingly annoyed by the extent to which no-name hack writers and peripheral media personalities have taken to relying on shock value to draw attention to themselves and advance their careers to some level beyond complete obscurity.
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We see the anonymous guests on Fox News trying to say the most ridiculously outlandish things they can imagine – "Maybe I'll be the next Glenn Beck!" – and legions of fourth-rate Free Republic commenters filling blogs with as much vitriol as possible to attract attention.
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Basically anyone who can figure out how to use Blogger is trying to one-up the herd. There are Regnery book deals to be had, after all. And the situation is only exacerbated by highly trafficked, even mainstream media outlets giving a platform to these voices due to the same need to stand out and get attention.

That, in not-so-short, is how the Chronicle of Higher Education and some nobody named Naomi Schaefer Riley teamed up to subject the public discourse to a mound of dreck entitled "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations."

As the title portends, Riley uses the laziest, cheapest technique for taking potshots at Them Ivery Tower Libruls. Academic writing is loaded with buzzwords, jargon, and pretentious phrasing, and it often covers subjects of almost comical obscurity. So for AM Radio hacks and semi-literate bloggers there's nothing easier than looking at the names of courses or the titles of papers and working themselves into a diabetic frenzy deriding the material without knowing anything about it. Riley does not disappoint. Her MO is to list some dissertation titles from the Northwestern Black Studies program and then laugh about how stupid she thinks they sound.

If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, "'So I Could Be Easeful': Black Women's Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth." It began because she "noticed that nonwhite women's experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery." How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in "natural birth literature," whatever the heck that is? It's scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of "Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s." Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government's promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don't tell them about the black president!) She explains that "The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market." The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

What could possess the Chronicle to give this the time of day, especially given that the author has zero academic credentials to suggest that her opinion on this topic might be relevant? Well, it has been a few weeks since anything in that publication has attracted widespread notice, and they like to keep things exciting. So why not toss out something that will cause its academia-centric audience will flip its lid? Look at all those site visits! Who cares if she made zero effort to engage this work on any remotely serious level. Them titles are funny!

There are two ways to make it as a writer, and one of them – having some combination of talent, creativity, or intellectual merit – is unavailable to this author. So she does what every other unknown, unaccomplished hack toiling away in obscurity realizes is his or her only chance to be noticed. She sits down and basically writes a 500 word version of "HAHAHA NI***RS AMIRITE?
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LOL!" and waits for the call to appear as a guest on O'Reilly. Maybe she'll even get booted from the Chronicle and become the latest right wing martyr to get a speaking tour and book deal. "I was ostracized by the Liberal Establishment!
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"

I am going to puke blood the next time I have to watch, listen to, or read these blatant attempts by failures to throw a bunch of red meat into the public sphere and kick back and wait for that call from Fox or the Daily Caller. In truth she and her drivel are hardly worth our attention – and the Chronicle goddamn well knows it – yet here we are. Congratulations, Naomi. You've got our attention now. Too bad writers like you (i.e., shitty ones) are a dime a dozen, or else your plan might have worked.

Whether regular readers realize it or not, I read every comment that is posted here even when the daily total reaches triple digits. I remember well when I started this site and it felt cool to get one comment per post, not to mention the (eventual) thrill of seeing the occasional comment from strangers who were not my immediate friends. In short, I don't take it for granted that people bother to spend their time reading this stuff and writing some kind of response. It seems like the respectful thing to do to read the comments. Even the stupid ones. But I kid.

On Monday's post, we see an exchange in the comments that typifies one of the differences in mindset between liberals and conservatives in this country. It's one of the most common sources of irritating, time-wasting arguments on the internets: one person makes an assertion, and another says, in essence, "prove it". Explain it in great detail and show your work.

One of two things is true in this situation. If we assume that the skeptic has good intentions – i.e., he is legitimately interested in exchanging ideas and perhaps learning something or correcting his misconceptions – then the issue is merely laziness. Take this hypothetical exchange:

Al: "Barack Obama supports keeping troops in Afghanistan until 2050."
Bob: "No he doesn't. That's ridiculous."
Al: "O RLY? LINKS PLS."

The correct response on Bob's part, assuming that dealing with delicate feelings is not one of his concerns, is "Google it, pal. I'm not your research assistant.
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" Even if in this instance Al really is curious but is limited by inaccurate information, it's not others' responsibility to fix it.
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If you're the one who's mangling the facts, be a grown up, read something that isn't written by an AM Radio host, and update your beliefs accordingly.

The second possibility is that Al isn't making a real good faith effort to engage and discuss something. He is just out to waste your time. The goal is for you to respond with a thousand word treatise full of links and examples, all of which he will dismiss out of hand, followed by changing the subject or expressing more skepticism (Your sources, for example, are probably "biased"). Getting sucked into such an exchange will accomplish nothing because it's not a conversation, it's a game. In 2004, the Bush campaign utilized Karl Rove's strategy of throwing out topics off the cuff, watching with delight as the Kerry campaign devoted lots of time and resources to responding, and then simply ignoring it and moving it on to something else. They called this "chasing the rabbit." Kerry's campaign took the bait repeatedly, wandering off message and wasting time.

When someone expresses skepticism over something that is either totally obvious ("Since when does the Republican Party take contradictory positions on issues? I NEED LOTS OF EXAMPLES.") or a simple factual question ("McKinley is taller than Mount Hood? LINK PLZ.") it is probably not sincere. "I'm not your secretary. Google it." is the preferred response, possibly followed by a comma and "dumbass" if the situation calls for it. At this point, he or she will dismiss your viewpoint – "See, you can't find any links because I'm right!" – which may tempt you to respond. Rest assured that a factual, detailed, response would have been dismissed just as summarily.

If people actually want to learn something or verify facts, there are amazing new technologies that allow them to do so. If they don't understand how to find things on the internet quickly, you shouldn't enable their ignorance / laziness. It's far more likely, of course, that they know damn well how to find things on Google but they'd rather let you do all the work and then follow up with a "NOPE!" afterward.

These exchanges rival watching paint dry in terms of thoughtfulness and informational value.
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By now we are well aware of how much it sucks to be a young adult in 2012 America. Yeah, it sucks to be a lot of ages, but the older generations at least have a few consolation prizes – the tail end of pensions and health benefits from employers, and a high likelihood of getting something out of Social Security and Medicare – even if insufficient. There isn't much else to say about unemployed, college graduate twentysomethings working at Starbucks or living at home.

This editorial from a Harvard Business Review writer raises an excellent, albeit incomplete, point about people currently in the 25-40 range before coming to one of the least satisfying conclusions since my visit to the I-10 Massage Cabana next to the Stuckey's (Exit 297).

The rules keep changing while you are mid-way through the game. The bedrock principles of Boomers' financial plans were: (1) A good education will help you get a good job and (2) Putting money into a home is the best way to build the equity for long-term financial security. Both of these rules have failed Generation X.

This, I think, is an important point. When people in my age-peer group talk about our careers and financial status, one of the things that comes up most often is how Our Parents just do not seem to understand that things have changed. We have conversations with our older friends or relatives who say things like, "There's no health insurance? That can't be right. Let me see the forms next time you visit," or, "Why haven't you bought a house yet? Renting is just throwing money away." They mean no harm; if anything, they mean to help (through nagging). That does not make such advice any less frustrating or impractical. People who graduated from college in the 1960s have a hard time grasping the concept of graduating from college and not being able to find a job. You must not be looking hard enough!

Now the goalposts have moved, and the part of the older generation that does understand the new reality has done what it does best: vote Republican and blame us for being dumb enough to take their advice. Why did we sink so much money into houses we can't afford? Why did we borrow 0,000 to go to law school?

This requires complete amnesia of everything that our society encouraged people to do for, oh, 75 years prior to 2008, but that's not a problem. They do amnesia well. The author also neglects the important third pillar of the Boomer Advice: stocks. Stocks! Stocks! Stocks! Mutual Funds and whatnot too. Ameritrade! 401(k)! Jackpot! Yeah, that one didn't work terribly well either. Turns out that we're not all sitting at home, retired at 40 and e-trading all day.

Maybe the real problem is that, having realized that the House-College-Career advice is no longer good, relevant, or useful, they find themselves lacking an alternative.

The urge to lecture us remains, but they appear to be running out of plausible platitudes. For those who realize that it's in poor taste and logic to play the blame game, the most popular advice these days appears to be:

More than ever, X'ers are being challenged to invent their own path forward. As it has been before, that path will almost certainly be less guided by conventional rules and less dependent on traditional institutions, than by X'ers' own sense of self-reliance and quest for multiple options. I encourage X'ers to re-imagine the next 30-50 years of your life: most of you won't have the institutionally-funded retirement options that many Traditionalists have enjoyed or the housing-based nest egg that provides many Boomers with the flexibility to blend volunteer and paid work over the years ahead. But you have your own ingenuity and entrepreneurial skills with which to build a unique future…X'ers should avoid even trying to follow the Boomers' path and, instead, have confidence to bring your own pragmatic sensibility both to organizational leadership — and to the design of your own life plan.

This is almost indistinguishable from the advice we might give someone on their way to prison: Figure it out, and good luck.
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Mom and Dad had pensions and job security, we have our "own sense of self-reliance and quest for multiple options." Neat.

So my friend Bob and I are wooing the same woman. That this is fictional should already be apparent, as no one has used the word "wooing" seriously in about 40 years. Suspend your disbelief for a moment.

I've gone on a few dates with her and she seems nice. Bob has done the same. The time has come to take the relationship to the next level, so she has to choose.
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We are both decent guys, and not without our respective merits. Bob and I each get one final date to make our pitch. I go first and promise that, despite my gargoyle-like appearance and mouth like a longshoreman, I'm loyal, supportive, and funny. And I do a lot of housework to boot, should we ever move in together. She seems pleased. I like my chances.

After she meets with Bob, he and I convene to talk about our experiences.

I relay that my experience was positive and I think she has an interest in me. Bob agrees; "I felt like you were going to be the choice, so I had to sweeten the deal.

" What does that mean, I ask? "Well", Bob replies, "I offered to pay her rent.

And to buy her a car. And I guaranteed that I'd come over once weekly to clean her house."

"Jesus", say I.

"And do her laundry."

"Oh, Bob. That's…that's pitiful. Have a little dignity."

"Save the sour grapes for another time," Bob says. "I think you're just jealous. And upset that she picked the better man."

This actually worked? "Yes," Bob tells me. "It's official. She and I are now a couple." While I find this surprising and sad, I realize that a woman who would choose a partner based on such criteria must be fickle, shallow, and altogether incapable of long term commitment. I am better off without her, and to Bob I wish nothing but the best in what is likely to be a bad relationship. Unfortunately Bob and I aren't very close anymore, as he seems to derive great pleasure from gloating about his superiority over me and his desirability as a mate as evidenced by his ability to snag this questionable excuse for a woman. "Bob," I say gently, "she picked you because you're basically paying her to be your girlfriend. She might think you're a total loser for all you know." The words fall on deaf ears. He is proud of his "accomplishment." I pity him.

Then self doubt sets in. Should I have done more? Am I undesirable? Will I be alone forever? Is this what it takes to find a partner these days, and I need to get with the program? Rejection is never easy to deal with and all of these negative thoughts are natural responses to it. Ultimately, though, I tell myself that I did the right thing. She was cool but I'm not about to start paying people to date me. That makes absolutely no sense. Then again, I suppose the rationality depends entirely on how desperate one is to be in a relationship.

Neat story, right? And on a totally unrelated note that I will leave here for no particular reason, two counties in Georgia just outbid several other sad sack states (both Carolinas, Mississippi, etc.) for a new Caterpillar factory and 1000 to 1400 jobs. All it cost them was $60-80 million in incentives and the promise of a docile workforce that would be thrilled to get $11/hr.

Greg Giraldo, another brilliant dead guy, from his final CC special (and album) "Midlife Vices":

The economy's been terrible, of course. But you know what? There's some good things about the economy being so bad. People are keeping things in perspective for the first time ever. It's unbelievable, people saying things like, "you know what? I hate my job, but in this economy, I'm happy just to have my job. A lot of people don't have their jobs, you know? I didn't get a raise this year, but in this economy, I'm happy just to have what I have.
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A lot of people don't have that. I have a shit car, But in this economy, I'm happy I still have my car. A lot of people don't even have cars in this economy.

This is the setup for, of all things, a buttsex joke. Giraldo was well above average at the "Let's get serious for a moment…" setup with a completely juvenile punchline. But the reason that the audience bites on this intro is that it is quite true.

The Great Recession has prompted a noticeable downshift in the kind of out-of-control materialism that we all love to decry. For the first time in my lifetime, people seem to be unashamed of, you know, buying used things, or making things, or driving small cars, or specifically avoiding all of the usual American "Hey look at how much money I have!" behaviors (that usually signified little more than a high tolerance for borrowing money – but that's another story). Lazy journalists have told the story of "Downshifting" repeatedly since 2008, those endlessly derivative Sunday magazine features about Bonnie and Dale who used to make $250,000 per year, got laid off, and now understand the simple pleasures of used Volvos*, NPR, recycling, knitting sweaters, camping vacations, and planting an organic kale garden.

It's understandable why people think this is a good thing. Certainly the attitudes in our society toward wealth, consumption, and quality of life were (and remain) seriously out of whack in recent years. The kind of values these stock characters exemplify – thrift, simplicity, and so on – also happen to be in line with my own. I should be happy about people "keeping things in perspective for the first time ever." But every time I hear these stories I want to find the responsible six-figure-earning segment producers responsible for it and go on a choking spree. "Keeping things in perspective" is a good idea, except, as is the case in this great experiment in economic insecurity without social upheaval, when it is a more polite way of saying "Lower your expectations" and "Know your place.

"

It would be great if Americans decided to drive small cars because they realize "Hey, a three person household doesn't need a damn SUV!", but that suggests behaviors changing due to lessons learned. What these tales always imply, though, is that people are merely learning to (insert trite phrase like "make do with less" here). They traded the SUV for a small car because they can't afford the SUV anymore. People aren't "downshifting" because it struck them that working 60 hours per week is a waste of one's life; they're doing it because some guy in Indonesia is now doing their job.

Someone with a sunnier disposition might consider this a net positive regardless. Anything that makes Americans behave less like teen girls let loose in the mall with an unlimited credit card has to be good, right? The problem is that we have all seen the data repeatedly and we know that some Americans – not many, but some – are doing extraordinarily well these days. Far from downshifting their lifestyles, they're doing the exact opposite. If I was a cynic, I might think that all of this Luddite glorification of gardening and handcrafts and home cooked meals and bicycling and thrift was just a way for the people in control to streamline costs. And that's without even getting into the further shift in the employee-employer balance of power implied by lines of reasoning like, "My job sure does suck a lot of ass, but I should be happy just to have it!"

I want to buy used clothes and repair them with a sewing kit because I want to buy used clothes and repair them with a sewing kit – not because I work full time and can't afford a $15 pair of new jeans. There's a big difference between those two scenarios, a difference that journalists and social commentators – lovers of subtlety, one and all – have neglected to appreciate. Shocking, I know.

* This autocorrects to "vulvas." Be careful.

OK, so we know that lotteries are machines designed to extract money from the poor and redistribute it to the middle and upper classes in the form of property tax relief, school funds, and merit-based scholarships. This is the point at which one of our friends on the right reliably steps in to remind us that no one points a gun at the poor and forces them to buy lottery tickets. This is indisputable. It also leaves us with the question of why people willingly participate in something that siphons off income they can scarcely afford to spare in exchange for catastrophically lousy odds of striking it rich. Anyone who is poor, has been poor, has close friends or family who are poor, or works in close contact with the poor understands that long term financial planning and rational money management are not traits the poor possess in great quantity. Accordingly many people simply conclude that the poor are not smart enough to behave in their own rational self interest. This is a common way of reaching our preferred conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their predicament. In reality, of course, the poor know very well that state lotteries are screwing them. That doesn't stop them because the experience of being poor in the United States is little more than getting screwed repeatedly ad infinitum until all parties are completely desensitized to the act.

Lotteries are the descendents of older, informal, private-sector prize systems like "policy wheels" (often run by neighborhood merchants as a way of distributing money people would then use to shop) or numbers games (usually run by organized crime). It wasn't until the 1960s – New Hampshire in 1964, to be specific – that states legalized, and then dove headlong into, the lotto business. The key difference for consumers when control shifted from the black market to the public sector was that the odds got a lot worse and the payoffs got much larger. Oh, and the winners got the honor of paying taxes on their prizes. Yes, lotteries actually got more exploitative when the mob stopped running them. The theory behind state control was and is simple: find a way to boost flagging revenues without taxing people who vote, and since gambling and playing the numbers are going to happen anyway (as Pennsylvania Governor Rendell so animatedly pointed out on TV recently) the state might as well get some tribute out of it. That the same logic could be applied to drugs and other illegal vices escapes most of our elected officials.

But I digress. On the original point, poor people play the lottery because they have one all-consuming goal: to be not-poor. It does not matter if the odds are ten to one or a billion to one; if the possibility exists that a given poor person can wake up the next day and instantly not be poor, he or she is going to take that chance. I have known poor and borderline poor people who play $100+ on the lottery every week. I have tried (and failed, of course) to explain that saving the $100 every week would give them over $5000 at the end of just one year. But he and I think differently about these things. The inability to save money or plan for the future are classic stupid habits we develop when we're poor, and it has the added bonus of guaranteeing that you will stay poor as well.

Blowing that $20 every day on scratch-off tickets is just one of the dozens of ways that the poor get reamed on the regular, and it's actually one of the few that offers any upside (even at long odds). They're treated unsympathetically (at best) by the police and courts. They can't afford the food that won't make them fat and sick, and they can't get to the grocery stores that sell it anyway (Not to worry! The neighborhood has a liquor/convenience store on every corner). Their own neighbors rob them and push the most addictive drugs on them. Predatory lenders offer usurious short term loans and, increasingly, credit cards and mortgages. They live among the waste products of the dirtiest, most polluting industries in their area. Politicians and planners use them as experimental subjects, shuffling them through one hare-brained Urban Renewal Plan after another. What few jobs are available are usually backbreaking and low paid – although that never stops The System from regularly reminding them that they work too little and make too much. Most of all, though, they are regularly ripped off by scam artists selling hope – the for-profit education industry, evangelists, politicians, banks, casinos, and, yes, lotteries.

Taking money from people who have little and are powerless against even the slightest chance of escaping poverty is the kind of activity usually associated with the Mafia and street gangs. State governments are more than happy to play the part though, and they've gone far beyond anything organized crime ever did in terms of exploiting the desperation of the poor and selling them false hope with terrible odds. Lotteries that take their money for the explicit purpose of giving it to people who are financially better off is evidence of how completely our governments – particularly here in the South – have abandoned even the pretense of holding the moral high ground. They've identified the victims of an exploitative system and chosen to use that to their advantage. The poor, for their part, are all too willing to play along. Spending $20 on the lotto every day may not appear to make sense until we realize that to the poor, there's no point in saving that $20 – someone or something else is just going to come along and swindle them anyway. Might as well blow that money on what might be, but never is, their literal ticket out of a life of grinding poverty.

Here in Georgia, many college students (especially, but not exclusively, at public schools) receive something called the HOPE scholarship. It was created in 1993 by then-Governor and eventual Senator Zell Miller, the Joe Lieberman of the South. The program is uncomplicated, being both entirely merit-based and entirely funded from the Georgia Lottery. High school students qualify by getting a GPA over 3.0 or scoring above the 85th percentile on the SAT or ACT. The program was sold to an enthusiastic voter base as a way to help those unfortunate kids who happen to be academically successful but poor. Predictably, it hasn't quite worked out that way.

We know two things. One is that higher income areas and families are the ones that can afford expensive ACT/SAT prep courses. This coincides with the de facto segregation of the public school system and the tax base. The other is that the Lottery is disproportionately played by the dirt poor, and especially poor blacks (see extensive analysis of the economics and demographics of lotteries here or here). In politics and public relations, the state never fails to trot out some examples of the kind of student the program ostensibly aims to help: poor, and usually black or Hispanic, with appropriately hardscrabble biographies.
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Hiding behind these anecdotes are the hard data, which reveal that the vast majority of HOPE recipients are students who would be in college anyway.

There are a few red flags here. First, if suburbanites with above-median incomes are big fans of a program aimed at helping minorities and the poor, it's a safe bet that it's not actually helping minorities and the poor. Second, when such programs are limited in geographic scope to Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and South Carolina, it is a safe bet that a) it's a terrible idea and b) its primary beneficiaries are going to be upper-middle class homeowners and/or businesses.

The reward structure of the HOPE program is misguided enough on its own; funding it with lottery money is downright malicious. Look at where lottery programs advertise, and more importantly how. Georgia uses slogans like "Today Could Be the Day!" to sell hope at liquor stores and gas stations in run-down neighborhoods, and they're not unique in that regard.
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Michigan has used the slogan "The Rich: Join Them!" just in case its residents don't grasp subtlety. New Yorkers are told, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream!" while Chicago advertisements play on the geography of wealth and poverty ("How to get from Washington Blvd. to Easy Street!") and outright deception ("This could be your ticket out.") Several years ago our nation's capital scraped the bottom of the barrel by using a photo of Martin Luther King with the tagline: "His vision lives on. Honor the dream – play DC Lottery.
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Even a casual familiarity with the statistics and the marketing of lotteries reveal that they are and always have been a lower class phenomenon. Not content to use the money extracted from the urban poor for "property tax relief", red states are leading the way in simply giving the money to the children of the wealthy and near-wealthy. Income redistribution is a hallmark of creeping socialism – that is, when the poor benefit from it.
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It turns out that using the government to move money from one person to another is A-OK when the money flows up the socioeconomic ladder.