How to Part the Poor From Their Dollars

The governor has let it be known that he plans to fire Chon Gutierrez, the director of the California Lottery. Gutierrez’s apparent crime is his failure to suck the maximum amounts of money from the state’s poor.

The governor’s action should be applauded. Even a cursory review shows Gutierrez’s record to be lamentable in exploiting the lottery. Last year, the lottery’s revenues dropped by $400 million from the previous year. That’s $400 million that could have gone to support more lotteries and fill the state treasury. Instead, it stayed in the pockets of the lottery’s best customers, the good citizens of the ghettos and barrios.

And what, do you think, happened to that $400 million? Who knows. Some of it bought furniture maybe, or groceries. In any case, the governor wants to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Gutierrez has got to go.

I do not mean to imply here that a philosophical difference exists between Gov. Pete Wilson and our soon-to-be-departed lottery director. It appears that Gutierrez took his best shot at separating the poor from their money. He simply wasn’t very good at it.

That best shot turned out to be a decision, made last year, to double the odds against winning the lottery. Gutierrez and his people figured this strategy would produce some lottery drawings with no winners at all, enabling them to roll over the jackpot until the bonanza reached the tens of millions. Gutierrez was shooting for Lottomania.

And he got it, once or twice. But the lottery’s steady customers, the ones who line up outside the liquor stores, understood that the already long odds in the lottery had now reached the astronomical. In effect, their interests had been sacrificed in the attempt to create a gambling frenzy.

So some of them stopped buying. “Even people who play the lottery are not so stupid to play into that kind of doubling,” Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd of Carson said on Monday. It was a statement remarkable both for its candor and for what it revealed about Sacramento’s attitude toward the lottery customer.

Which is to say, Sacramento regards them as suckers. As people who have been fooled into bearing a greater share of the tax burden. In Sacramento’s view, the whole trick is to keep those people buying the tickets, and Gutierrez made the fatal error of encouraging them to stop.

But after Gutierrez is history, what next? How can Sacramento fool the poor into coughing up that $400 million that they craftily held back last year? It’s hard to say.

Assemblyman Floyd has suggested that the state expand into the arena of sports betting. It’s my guess that this strategy will not succeed. Sports betting is an experts’ game, not vulnerable to the kind of impulse buying that is the backbone of the poor-man’s wager.

No, Sacramento will need something simpler and flashier. The lottery commission could, for example, mount huge slot machines on flatbed trucks and drive them slowly through the ghettos at night. When a crack house is encountered, the state’s gamblermobile could simply pull up to the curb and offer the crowd a little entertainment while the deals are going down.

Or perhaps the state could explore the potential of achieving a return on its welfare outlays. At the welfare office, three-card monte games could be posted by the door. As the welfare moms exit with their checks, they could be offered a double-or-nothing opportunity by the state-trained monte player.

The game could be so designed as to allow one mom in 10 to collect her bet. While seemingly low, these odds would be substantially better than those offered by the lottery.

There are many other possibilities, of course. The trick, which Gutierrez never seemed to learn, comes in avoiding the appearance of greed. The slots on the flatbeds should be generous, and players who win jackpots should be advertised widely in the neighborhood. Ditto the welfare moms who get lucky at monte.

In the same vein, the state might even consider a play on the snack tax. Cash registers could be programmed to pay off a modest sum for every 10,000th purchase of Ding Dongs or Twinkies, thereby encouraging taxable sales while reducing public resentment among the poor.

To repeat: easy does it. More than anything else, that’s the challenge that faces Gov. Wilson in the aftermath of the ham-handed administration of Gutierrez. The governor’s choice of successor will say much about his understanding of the state’s poor.

After all, there’s $400 million at stake here. The dangers are high, surely, but the potential rewards are as bright as the Vegas night.