Flat overall income has panel pushing to privatize Arizona Lottery

2 comments:

• dustbowl11 posted at 7:00 am on Sun, Oct 9, 2011.

  Posts: 85

  If the lottery is not bringing in sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile why not cancel it? Why is the state encouraging gambling anyway? Seems pretty clearcut to me. Unless of course, you are trying to steer the contract to politically connected friends. The Arizona way, like Jan Brewer and her private prison running friends.

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• Arizona Willie posted at 9:26 am on Sun, Oct 9, 2011.

  Posts: 1907

  Lets see now .... the lottery has been making money for the state.
  The lottery has not lost money.

  But they want to privatize it so that a corporation can take some of the profits that have been going to the state.

  That is EXACTLY what happens when they privatize a state operation.

  The state government doesn't have multi-million dollar execs to run the lottery -- private business would.

  The state does not give execs million dollar + bonuses and a private business would.

  All of that comes out of revenue from the lottery leaving less to give the state.

  Supposedly the revenue for the private company would be capped at 5% of income from the lottery ... so the private company has to operate the lottery on 5% or less of lottery revenues.

  Has anyone calculated how much the state spends to run the lottery as a percentage of revenue?

  I don't think they care. I think they want to turn a profitable operation over to cronies who will " take care of them " when they are out of office.

  There are very few times when private enterprise can run an operation more efficiently than government because private enterprise has to take profits right off the top to satisfy stockholders ... not to forget the private enterprise would also have to pay taxes on the revenues and the state operation does not -- the state would be paying taxes to itself.

  Private enterprise has it's place --- but it is NOT always the best way to do things.

  If the lottery were losing money ( how in the world would it do that? ) that would be one thing ... but the lottery is profitable and makes money for the state and it would be insane to give it away to private enterprise.

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