I noticed their new tagline myself and was similarly annoyed. I can't help but wonder if they think that people who normally wouldn't play the lottery are, all of the sudden, going to start routinely plunking down their cash because, oh gosh, it's for the schools. Shopping at Giant can help the schools, and I still try to avoid that like the plague.

Cor, I'd only been thinking in terms of their attempt to make themselves look respectable. I didn't consider the follow-on that they might actually be trying to get me to pony up.

That may also explain why they were offering lottery subscriptions as potential Christmas presents this year.

This sounds like a suspiciously non-conservative position. Free market, free will, blah, blah, and all that...

What I've noticed from one state's annual budgets is that they earmark less and less from the general fund to to to schools, letting the growth in lottery income to pick up the slack. So in total, school spending doesn't change that much but the sources do.

The Virginia Lottery: Taxing Ignorance To Promote Education.

State-sponsored gambling is a issue that cuts across the conservative-liberal divide. You can make conservative arguments for or against, and you can make liberal arguments for or against.

I consider myself a Conservative, but state lotteries offend me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it sets up a government monopoly, with all the inherent inefficiency and corruption that implies. I also don't like the notion of government having a revenue source directly tied to a human vice --government itself is enough of one. The more sources of revenue that the government has which are free from scrutiny by the taxpayer -- which lotteries largely are -- tend to promote the unfettered growth of government, with all the evil that implies.

Mainly, though, I hate them because of the bastards in front of me in line at the convenience store who waste my time by buying lottery tickets/cashing them in/generating numbers, etc.