THE STUPIDITY TAX

There’s been a lot of debate in these pages and elsewhere, on the question of funding for the public schools. People object to their property taxes being raised to fund better schools. People in counties where property values are low say that that system of funding is inherently unfair anyway because they could tax every parcel of property in their counties at 100% rate and only make enough dough to buy one "Dick and Jane" book and a box of chalk. So, the legislature has once again turned to that perennial hot potato: a state lottery. And, predictably, the usual bizarre coalition of Bible-thumpers and bleeding hearts has assembled to wail at us that a state lottery will be the Death of Civilization As We Know It In North Carolina.

Have you ever noticed that the people who predict all of the horrible things that people will do if there’s a lottery never mention that they, the pundits themselves, might do any of these things? No, it’s the other guy who we have to watch out for. It’s those other poor saps that lottery opponents are trying to protect, God bless ‘em. And the poorest saps of all are, well, the poor. It’s the poor, the anti-lottery folks say, that need to be protected from that bad old lottery.

Lottery opponents often compare a lottery to a "regressive tax" because it unevenly affects the poor. This ignores the fact that it’s not just the poor who buy lottery tickets. Heck, I buy them myself every time I visit the dear old Commonwealth of Virginia (State motto: "We Might As Well Be Yankees.") I know people from all walks of life—rich, poor, and "I guess I’m making it"--who buy lottery tickets just for the heck of it. No, the lottery is not a tax on the poor. If a person stakes all their hopes and the rent money on the Lotto or the Pick Five or whatever, they’re being taxed all right, but not because they’re poor. What’s being taxed is gullibility.

The lottery, to put it bluntly, is a tax on the stupid. If you have a little stupidity in you, like me, you’ll buy a lottery ticket or two. If you have a lot of stupidity, and only then, you’ll spend all your money on tickets. And let’s face it, if you’re going to tax something, you might as well tax something that there’s a lot of. It’s why taxes seem to fall disproportionately on the middle class: the poor don’t have any money, and there aren’t really enough rich people to make it worth your while. You tax things that there’s a lot of. And what is there more of in this world than stupidity? It cuts across all economic lines. There are stupid poor people, stupid rich people, and a whole bunch of stupid middle-class people.

In fact, stupidity is so plentiful that we should consider it, not just as a source of revenue, but as a source of energy as well. Think of what could happen if we could harness stupidity and use it to create electricity. Stupid people are often quite energetic. Look at the U.S. Congress. You can call them a lot of things, but lethargic is not one of them. Why, I’ll bet Dan Burton alone could power a small town. And John Rocker…if that ol’ boy’s stupidity could be converted to energy, we could move mountains, I tell you.

I call upon the U.S. Government to create a research initiative--a new Manhattan Project, if you will-- to harness the power of stupidity. Let’s put the nation’s sharpest minds to work on putting the nation’s dullest minds to work. And in the meantime, let’s take their money and fund the schools.

Of course, if the schools get better (and if they teach anything about basic probability), there’ll be less stupidity, and we’ll probably sell fewer lottery tickets, but hey, it makes as much sense as taxing smokers to fund programs to wipe out smoking.

COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.