Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally. No one could object to that, could they? This beast is not exactly a milestone in the history of the acronym but it contains much that is typical and objectionable in anything that goes by sentimental initials. The HOPE is famous around here, enjoying an existence as a sacred cow nearly as holy at the State level as, say, Social Security is at the Fed. It is a program (or scheme) to fund college education for Georgia students. Financed completely by lottery revenue, it was the reason the lottery was ever able to be born in this bible-belt state. Hardly anyone can remember now that there was serious opposition both moral, religious and practical when the firecracker Democrat Zell Miller rode his idea into the Governor’s Mansion in ’91 and today nearly every Georgian is touched someway by HOPE.

It seems like a fantasy now but believe it or not, in days of yore, if someone running for office proposed a new multi-billion dollar entitlement program some objection was sometimes made to the cost. Just how will this be paid for? As the gentleman said, the path to victory in any election is to not tax you and not tax me but to tax that fellow behind the tree. Miller did an end run around this dilemma. HOPE would not touch Georgia tax revenues, not a dime. Instead the State would go into a business that was otherwise illegal, basically the numbers racket. The Number as a game of chance is almost unknown today as it has been driven out of existence not by being declared illegal, which it was time and again, but rather through government sponsored competition. Back in da day, The Number would be some mundane publicly released figure like shipping tonnage or somesuch that players would bet on the last three or four digits. Some Numbers operations would, like the modern State lotteries, draw their own number randomly but this would be a little prone to manipulation. Numbers games of many descriptions were played across the nation since before her birth. Expert and political opinion was typified by the pronouncement from one State legislature that it is the lowest, meanest, worst form … [that] gambling takes in the city of New York. And this is quite inarguable. Not only does it take much more from the player than any other form of gambling, it was explicitly designed to entice the pauper above all others. Bets could be for as little as a penny and worst of all, credit was often easily handed out and brutally collected. Despite that The Numbers was wildly popular and wildly profitable. So what to do? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em succinctly sums up the calculation.

We won’t blame old Zell, or not overmuch. All but a handful of States now run a Numbers Racket of some sort and this does not include Nevada so it doesn’t seem that a pious aversion to gambling is the only argument against it. It might be that the lifeblood of Las Vegas would be discredited if lotteries were too widespread. The shadiest casino in Reno gives you a fairer shot at winning than the most scrupulously run State lottery. Pretty good slot machines will return 90-plus percent of every nickel injected into them. Modern, legal, State-run lotteries are far worse on this score than even the oldtime Numbers operators returning about 65% of the ticket sales in prizes.

But at least it’s voluntary, and as some acidly observe, the lottery amounts to a tax on the stupid, or at least the innumerate. And who would that be? It is no secret that lottery players are vastly over-present in the poor, even the poorest of the population. Of course this means black, hispanic and other marginal or minority groups, the same crowd that tends to pay the cigarette and booze taxes, but at least these are all conveniently available at the same locations. Since no one is obliged to buy the damn tickets it doesn’t amount to a tax so grumpy old anarchists can just shut up. It’s somebody’s sacred right to buy a lottery ticket, only not from some dude down the street. No no, this is a transaction so vile and meritless that only the government can validly participate. And participate she does but not passively. The various State lotteries are voracious purchasers of advertising and in Georgia as elsewhere those ads promise riches in a gaudy fashion that no indian casino could possibly get away with, even though their payouts are much more generous. A State agency is busy concocting new ways to persuade more dollars from more pockets for less return while promotion of tobacco and liquor, the other two legs of the stool of destitution, is strictly curtailed. The taxes that are paid on these vices actually go to ANTI-promotional campaigns which we all see every day to little good effect. The equivalent action of the lottery commission is to print the toll free number of the gamblers’ addiction hotline on each and every ticket.

So these mountainous funds are drawn from the population by marketing, not compulsion. But still they are drawn to no complaints. Why? Because the Complaining Class is rewarded sumptuously from this pile. At first the HOPE, like most gub programs of relief, was aimed, not at the poor so much but it was restricted to those with family incomes less than $100k. This lasted just a couple years. Zell Miller found out what FDR always knew: government run charity becomes unpopular quickly unless damn near EVERYONE (at least everyone who votes and runs their mouths) gets a piece of the pie. The shrill arguments of course were appeals to “fairness”, the term meaning, apparently, that a bag of free money was open to all comers regardless of need. The $100k cap was blown off and for fifteen years now HOPE has funded every college-track high school graduate with a B average. Yes, these are the Outstanding Pupils we Help Educationally. But are they? Is a 3.0 in an ordinary high school a mark of academic promise? Maybe it was, once, but coincident (and not coincidentally) with the HOPE there has been rampant grade inflation in Georgia public schools. It is to the point now where accrediting bureaus have ceased to recognize diplomas from Georgia high schools in several counties. Yes, this has happened nationally but Georgia leads the way! This was one of the problems supposedly addressed by Bush’s second biggest boondoggle, the No Child Left Alone program, which introduced many objective measures of school performance but since so few schools were making these quite modest goals, they have been scrapped or elided. There is today a huge standardized testing cheating scandal in Atlanta and other corners of the State that reveals the level of corruption. Has this been fueled by HOPE? Absolutely it has. HOPE is a money spigot, how could it not corrupt those institutions it showers its money upon?

It is a lonely and frustrating exercise, agitating against HOPE. If it was conceived as a bribe to the populace at large, they are staying bought. Even the most rabid Georgia TEA Party Patriot will defend HOPE. It is, they say, not just another entitlement! And perhaps not, but it IS another entitlement. If it is a transfer from poor to unpoor, mostly meaning from colored to pale this seems to be a malign selling point. Hey, we’re paying so much out to these darkies anyhow, at least this is a way to get a bit back. And it is far more than a bit. But like all these dreams of infinite riches, infinity has turned out to be more cramped than we imagined. 2005 saw a stiff reduction in lottery sales which came calamitously not long after HOPE was expanded to cover other things like pre-K and so reach if not from cradle to grave at least from diaper to bong. Revenues down, claims up! Hey, where have I seen that before? As proposed by Miller HOPE also only covered the first two years of college but it wasn’t long before that was seen not as a two year leg-up but a bridge halfway to nowhere. Now it covers four years and also includes “non-traditional” students, basically meaning anyone otherwise left out of the party. In the mean time lottery sales have recovered. This is a dubious achievement for society but it has let the HOPE train continue and promise yet more favors in the future. But State tuitions are increasing and if tuition increases are opposed too forcefully then OTHER costs are increased. In the end it seems that HOPE was not able to spin gold out of nothing, except of course this is not the end. Expansion will continue. Greater benefits will be promised and only one thing can stop it: an economy so dreadful that even the ultra-poor have to stop buying malt liquor, menthol cigarettes and lottery tickets. Fortunately for us all, that is at hand.

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