I usually buy gas in Renfrew at a gas station that doesn’t sell lottery tickets. I can go in and pay and not have to wait and wait because people are buying lottery tickets and whatever else. The other day I was in Arnprior and low on gas so I filled up at a station and when I went in to pay there were six men in the lineup at the counter. All six bought lottery tickets. I stood in line for a long time. I hate that.
It doesn’t make sense if you complain about the cost of gas and you add lottery tickets to the purchase, making it an expensive stop for gas. When I finally got to the counter and plunked down cash to pay for the gas, the woman asked “Are you not going to buy a ticket?” She made it sound as if that’s what everyone did and it’s unusual or odd for someone to not buy a ticket, or tickets.
I said “Noooooooo, I have never bought a lottery ticket of any kind in my life and would never waste money like that and even if every person in Canada bought lottery tickets and the chance of winning was much better, I still wouldn’t buy tickets. Never. It’s gambling and it’s immoral.”
The woman was a little shocked at my outburst. The main purpose of playing the lottery is to win money and that’s wrong. The Bible tells us that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. God wants people to earn their money honestly by working hard.
I read somewhere that poor people in the U.S., those earning less than $13,000, spend an astounding nine per cent of their income on lottery tickets, making this so-called harmless game a deeply regressive tax.
Back in 1987 I penned a short letter to the Ottawa Citizen that made “Letter of the Day” — I said lotteries have become big business since they were legalized 15 years ago. They are an immoral way to tax the poor. Lotteries are probably the number one gambling problem in Canada. Some provinces, I pointed out, put their lottery profits into their general tax revenue. This is regressive and funnels money from the lower classes to the upper classes. It is also an immoral means for raising public revenues.
I know people who buy $100, $250 and even $500 tickets for a charity of some sort and they say it’s for a good cause so they don’t mind spending the money. But really, that’s not the case. People buy tickets hoping to win something, maybe the grand prize. If they bought the ticket to be so charitable, would they donate the prize — the fast car or the dream home — back to the charity? Now that would really help the charitable cause, wouldn’t it?
Look at it another way. The money you waste on all those lottery tickets, just think how much good food or health care items you can get if you didn’t buy the tickets.
Lotteries have become an addiction.
