Paul Kengor: The 'gift' of the lottery

Another Christmas season has ended, and so has, mercifully, another season of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania bearing false gifts of lottery tickets. It’s a perennial promise, with jolly state officials assuming the role of Anti-Santa.

It starts every year with those annoying commercials, usually around Black Friday. If you search for “Pennsylvania Lottery Christmas commercials,” you’ll find them on YouTube back to 1994. A familiar one, sung to the tune of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” goes like this: “This holiday season my good friend gave to me: Seven Powerball tickets, three Daily Numbers, two Mega Millions!” We glimpse a merry soul at the lottery stand who says, “Happy holidays, Rita!” The blissful Rita replies, “What a great gift!”

The voiceover informs the gullible: “Pennsylvania lottery tickets make great gifts!”

Except they don’t. They’re gifts to the state treasury, which cashes in on your merry gullibility, good friend. The lottery is crafted to ensure your return will not exceed the government’s return. The lottery banks on that year ’round. It’s the gift that doesn’t give; it takes.

My familiarity with lottery tickets is akin to my relationship with the McDonald’s and Sheetz bags and empty beer bottles flung into my rural front yard by crude drivers late at night. (Funny, I’ve never seen a Barnes & Noble bag chucked in my front yard.)

One day last fall, just to amuse myself, I gathered the useless scratched-off tickets and typed up a dubious inventory: Four tickets were peddled by the commonwealth as “Wild Numbers 50X.” At $10 each, they were billed as “10 TOP PRIZES OF $300,000!” Evidently, none of these on my lawn quite reached that potential.

Two others were “Fantastic 10s.” $10 each. Billed the same way.

One “Red Ball Tripler.” For a mere $2, you could win “10 TOP PRIZES OF $10,000!”

There also was “My Best Life $1.04 Million Cash.” For $2.

Every ticket promised a nice little “SCRATCH TO CASH.” Chicken scratch is more valuable.

In total: $64 blown by some poor sucker, literally tossed out the window. Courtesy of your friends at the government store. That is, the Pennsylvania Lottery, which, on each ticket graciously implores: “Play Responsibly — Problem Gambling Help: 1-800-GAMBLER.”

Gee, thanks, guys.

Generously provided is Gov. Tom Wolf’s signature, which prompts another gripe of mine regarding the lottery: Wolf is a liberal, and liberals are supposed to help the lower class. And the reality is poor people (not the wealthy) are more prone to blow precious dollars on this state-run rip-off scheme. Liberals nonetheless promote lotteries because they welcome the “good” things government does with the money — education, the elderly, blah, blah, blah. They’ve happily co-opted an “industry” once run by mobsters.

Liberals complain about things that are “regressive.” Well, what’s more regressive than this ruse? Every time I stop at the corner grocer in rural Washington County when visiting my in-laws, I wait behind some guy buying cigarettes, a 32-ounce Mountain Dew and this fool’s gold. The dealers in Harrisburg know it.

Yeah, I know. Playing the lottery is voluntary. No one forces little old ladies to dump Social Security dollars into this scheme. Still, if a private company bilked people like this, liberals would shut it down. Instead, they promote it, with your tax dollars. Even at Christmastime.

As for me, this is one Christmas gift I’m not buying.