RALEIGH – Just about every holiday, I take road trips with Walter Cronkite.
Now that I have your attention, let me rush to assure you that I don’t personally know the man. Moreover, I am reasonably certain that if he and I were confined in the same vehicle for more than, say, 15 minutes, the resulting chemical reaction – one part sanctimonious anti-anti-Communism, one part mushy-headed Progressivism, two parts libertarian conservatism – would create a dangerous explosion.
What I mean is that he of the dulcet, Southern-tinge tones is the narrator of an excellent audio series from Knowledge Products on the United States Constitution that I often enjoy during holiday trips. In a revealing example of how the “talent” can perform a script remarkably well with nary an inkling of its meaning, the Cronkite series provides listeners with a solid background on the constitutional convention, the ratification debates, and the text of the document and its amendments.
I particularly appreciated the discussion of constitutional amendments given a debate now underway in Raleigh, though the series focuses on the federal level and the debate is about North Carolina’s constitution. As the state’s new lottery commission works frantically to begin offering games in a few months, education leaders and politicians are again pondering the problem of supplantation – the phenomenon by which revenues generated from state-run gambling operations, rather than representing a new set of (usually education) programs, simply take the place of tax revenue that would have otherwise been spent on the same purpose.
Some are pointing to the example of Georgia as one lottery state that avoided the supplantation problem. It enacted a constitutional amendment setting out distinctly what the lottery would finance: preschool, technology, and college scholarships. The legislation authorizing the North Carolina lottery specified that preschool, class-size reduction, college scholarships, and school construction receive the net proceeds, but the rule does not have the status of a constitutional requirement.
Would it make much of a difference for North Carolina to set it out in an amendment? I doubt it. The supplantation risk has less to do with legislators redirecting lottery revenues later on than it does with legislators decided not to fund programs with tax revenues that will now be funded with lottery funds. Unless the amendment constitution specified particular levels of funding for each future year, levels below which the General Assembly would not be allowed to go, it could not head off the eventuality of supplantation – and such a specification is impractical to say the least.
A better way to address this narrow but important issue would have been to avoid dedicating lottery money to services previously funded by state taxpayers. Class-size reduction and preschool should always have been a no-no, but even in the cases of school construction and college scholarships the situation is muddy. There is a small annual stream of state funds that goes into school-capital fund, and the state enacted a statewide school-construction bond about a decade ago (some want to place another one on the ballot soon). As for scholarships in the UNC system, state taxpayers already cover the largest share of the cost of undergraduate education. Whether you like this practice or not, it indisputably means that future legislators, recognizing the existence of lottery-funded scholarships for many students, could choose not to fund UNC at the level they otherwise would have.
The best way to avoid supplantation would have been not to enact a lottery. And that’s the way it was.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.