This letter was sent to me by George Campbell, who many of you may know as the drummer in the nation's premier law rock band, Mikey Mel and the JD's.
Dear friends:
Please take the time to read this article. Over the last few weeks, reporters at the AJC have been trying to stir up a controversy that is based in neither fact nor logic. They have made statements tantamount to perhaps willful misrepresentations and, at best, gross negligence. At the heart of the issue is the business management of the Georgia Lottery Corporation – a state owned corporation, not a government agency. Like most industries in the 21st century, the lottery business is changing. It is no longer a high margin sales drive culminated in weekly drawings. Today, lottery revenue is primarily generated by scratch-off tickets, slot machines, and other instant-winnings type games, which are not high-margin. The pastime of sitting by the TV for the Monday night drawing is simply that – a growing relic of an ever changing industry.
The reporters of the AJC have made the bald assertion that the Lottery is somehow shorting the people of the State of Georgia. Yet, their evidence for this conjecture is not apparent. First, they claimed that remittances (money transferred to the scholarship fund) are too low as a percentage of sales. This fails miserably in the face of the irrefutable fact that gross profit, not profit margin, is the priority. Our children need more money, not higher percentages of sales. Fourth grade math students understand this concept. This baseless claim was quickly quashed by this Op-Ed article.
Now, they claim that the Lottery executives are overcompensated. This house of cards also falls under the weight of evidence: the lottery is a $3.4 billion business, which generated a record amount of (that’s right) gross profit for the HOPE scholarship this year totaling $843 million. Any business that would not reward its employees for such exemplary performance will immediately lose those people performing. Moreover, the highest paid executive of the Lottery, CEO Margaret DeFrancisco, earned only $500k, which pales in the face of other executive compensation plans. (The average CEO of a Fortune 500 company earned $10.8 million last year). Lastly, the AJC makes the misleading comparison of the Lottery salaries to that of Gov. Perdue and other state officials. As mentioned above, the Lottery is a corporation, and its shares are owned by the State of Georgia. Therefore, what state government employees make is entirely irrelevant. The reporters belie their own ignorance of the Lottery’s structure in making this comparison.
To conclude, the Georgia Lottery has generated record profits to award more money for more children to attend college and pre-k over the course of more years than any other comparable institution. There is no evidence under any set of facts to support this wild and imaginative witch hunt by the AJC. It is a shameful reflection on the integrity of the publication, and a blatant disservice to the people of Georgia. Therefore, I encourage you all to apply the facts, not the speculation, to this issue and decide for yourself. As you may know (or will discover from the Op-Ed piece linked above) my father is the Chairman of the Board of the Georgia Lottery. Thus, I am an interested party. But my interest is one of character and integrity, which I gladly place on the line in his defense. If you support these fact-based conclusions, please refer these Op-Ed articles to those you believe interested in the issue.
With my highest personal regards,
George A. Campbell, Jr.
3rd Year Student
University of Georgia School of Law
I, for one, am a lifelong fan (and occasional supporter) of the Georgia Lottery; they paid for 4 years of college for me. Not only that, but the programs guaranteed by the Georgia Lottery have raised the standard for post-secondary education in Georgia, and especially at my beloved University of Georgia, to a level that was unimaginable twenty years ago. The lottery has been an overwhelming success, and I, along with so many of my fellow University of Georgia graduates, am truly grateful for the opportunity their service to this state has allowed me.
1 comments:
George,
I hope that this response is in the spirit of your charge to decide for myself on this issue, but I have to disagree with you about the nature and effectiveness of the lottery. The lottery is not a business - it does not produce any product or service. It is a tax, albeit a voluntary one sweetened with misleading promises, on the people of this state who can least afford it. If the goal is simply revenue for education, why not levy a tax that will bring in the amount the lottery raises? Such a tax wouldn't have to cover the costs of running a lottery "corporation," so every penny (post-administrative costs) could go to education (and despite the acknowledged inefficiency of government, the administrative costs of a simple tax, however it is administered, would not rise to the "cost" of running a lottery corporation). As has happened in so many states, the lottery, which was promised as a supplemental source of funding for education, has become the main source of education money in Georgia. Georgia lawmakers now refuse to commit other state funds funds to education (and in fact they now appropriate funds that used to be committed to education for other purposes) because of the lottery. I can't support a source of funding that preys on the ignorance and false hopes of Georgia's poor, and I don't beleive that the state is really better off with a lottery than it would be with a legislature truly committed to funding education through traditional channels such as taxes. I am not an interested party in this debate. I never benefited from the HOPE scholarship, and I don't play the lottery. I do care about the state of Georgia, though, and while I agree wholeheartedly that access to excellent edcuation is essential to the future of this state, I cannot agree that the lottery is the best way to go about funding that goal.
Andrew Gorman
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