No shortage of ticket vendors
If one were to follow Senate Democratic Leader Robert Mellow’s way of thinking, Pennsylvania’s elderly would never need to worry about making the cliched choice of buying medicine or food if there were lottery pushers, make that vendors, on every street corner. Mellow was perturbed that fellow senators shot down an amendment during the lame duck session that would have installed Pennsylvania Lottery machines in the state liquor stores. He reasoned correctly that the PACE program is in trouble. But then his logic veered to this conclusion: If there were more opportunities for Pennsylvanians to buy Lottery tickets then they would gladly do so, adding to the gross sales and saving the prescription drug program.
We don’t have any argument with adding the Lottery to the liquor store’s offerings, just with Mellow’s reasoning for doing so. One would have to be sequestered in a deer camp in a remote forest of Pennsylvania to find a shortage of Lottery terminals. Ticket sellers are posted in so many retail centers that it’s impossible not to stumble across one or two opportunities each day to play. There’s not a shortage of machines. Perhaps there is a shortage of players, but the state needs to think long and hard about encouraging its residents to gamble even more than they do.
Mellow seemed to be on a better track when he was looking at better ways to effectively run the PACE program and to buy discounted drugs. More machines won’t do it.