Chuck Fuller
The Most Dangerous Sprawl Is Government Sprawl


Editor’s Note: Citizens For A Sound Economy is a volunteer organization of 14,000 members organized in 22 county organizations around the state. Nationally, the group is led by North Carolinian Boydan Gray. In North Carolina, Chuck Fuller is the executive director, and he recently announced that CSE was going to attempt to bring groups together from the left and the right, from religious and free-market perspectives, to fight the lottery. Charlotte World Editor and Publisher Warren Smith recently sat down with Fuller at his Raleigh apartment to discuss the lottery and the role of state government.

Warren Smith: I’m going to jump straight in to the lottery issue. Just yesterday Gov. Easley said that there was a better chance than ever that the lottery was going to pass. All the opinion polls say the public favors a lottery. Yet, Citizens for a Sound Economy is opposing lottery. Why are you doing this, and can you win?

Chuck Fuller: First of all, it’s the right thing to do. The public has been deceived and fooled and lied to by politicians across the state when they say that a lottery will bring revenue into the state and help education. There are better ways to improve education than for state government to go into the gambling business.

First of all, it is a fiscally irresponsible move. If you look at all the other states that have lotteries, you will discover that their revenues are declining. Florida and Georgia are having trouble this year making their commitments to their education systems.

WS: The Georgia system – with the Hope Scholarship – has been held up as a model. Are you saying that even the Georgia system is now not working? That the state will not be able to honor the promises of a scholarship to its citizens?

CF: They’ll honor the commitment, but they are now having to bring money in from other sources. Money from the lottery is no longer enough.

Let’s talk about the Hope Scholarship for a minute. That program was aimed at providing scholarships for less fortunate people, people who don’t have the money to go to college. But what they have found out is that higher income people, who would have gone to college anyway, are simply using the scholarship money to go to school, and fewer low income people are going. It is actually having a reverse impact. They’ve deceived the public again. Poor people are buying the lottery tickets, and that’s paying for more affluent people to go to college.

And there’s a factor in the lottery that people totally overlook, and the politicians don’t want to talk about. That is the economic cost of money being taken out of the economy due to gambling addictions. Studies have shown that this figure is anywhere from $715 to $32,000 per year for every problem gambler. If you took just the $715 figure and used figures that even the states agree will be an increase in problem addictions if the lottery is in place, that would shave over $200-million off of the net proceeds that the state of North Carolina says it is going to bring in.

WS: So the cost to the taxpayer in dealing with these social problems is over $200-million a year?

CF: At a minimum. That’s the lowest it could possibly be. And if you look at what is probably an average cost, the lottery starts out costing the state more money than it generates.

And that’s just the tip of it. The politicians are not telling us that the state will lose approximately $20- to $25-million in sales tax revenue. That will be lost because people will not buy a Coke and a pack of Nabs when they go in the store, they’ll buy a lottery ticket with their spare dollar or two, and the lottery ticket is not subject to sales tax.

What’s interesting about that particular piece is that sales taxes are a large part of what pays for school construction cost. Under Gov. Easley’s education plan, reducing class size is an important component. Reducing class size will require the building of additional classrooms, more schools. In other words, you’ll drive up construction costs. No where in Gov. Easley’s plan is there an accounting for this increase in construction costs. That will be put on to county governments.

WS: So you think that an education program on the lottery will change public opinion?

CF: Absolutely. People need to understand that the lottery is a get-rich-quick scheme that just won’t work. It will do to the citizens of North Carolina what it does to the majority of people who play the lottery. It will take their money and not give them anything in return.

We think people need to understand that.

WS: But should the people of North Carolina even be voting on this? Both Easley and Vinroot said they favored a referendum, but what about the constitutional issues?

CF: Our constitution is very clear that you cannot pass a statute through referendum. That can only be done through the General Assembly. What a referendum is, legally, is a one-day poll that says how the voters who voted feel about a particular issue. The General Assembly still has to pass the statute. So we spend millions of dollars campaigning, and millions of taxpayer dollars holding an election that does absolutely nothing legally because the General Assembly can still go back into session and vote any way they want to. So there is a constitutional issue as to why we would even subject the state to this.

WS: Then why is Gov. Easley in favor of both a lottery and a referendum? Are they intentionally deceiving the people of North Carolina?

CF: On the referendum: that’s the politician’s easy way out. It allows them to get off the hot seat. It’s a cop-out. They ought to stand up and do the right thing. Do the research and vote accordingly.

On the lottery itself: it grows the size of government, and the people who are pushing this want government to have more control of our lives. So the bigger they can grow the governmental sector, the more they like it. So this is more an issue about big government than it is about anything else.

As for Easley, he is looking for a way to add gross revenue to the state without paying attention to the net revenue. If the government has to spend more money, that’s OK with them. They want government to be bigger. The fiscal research division of the General Assembly did a study, for example, showing that the net proceeds of the lottery would be $300-million a year, based on what other states have seen. We don’t disagree with that number, but they don’t have all the costs associated with that number. So they’ve come partially to the right answer, but they haven’t added in all the costs.

WS: So you guys are arguing this issue not on moral grounds, but on economic grounds?

CF: That’s right. There are a lot of great groups in North Carolina. The North Carolina Family Policy Council. The Christian Action League. Christain Coalition. Even a couple of liberal groups. The Common Sense Foundation. It’s not a conservative-liberal fight. There’s common ground on this issue. We’re fighting the lottery because it is bad economic policy. We’re only involved in economic policy issues.

WS: I’m going to change the subject slightly since you mentioned some of these other group. What is unique about CSE. What is it that you do that these other groups don’t do?

CF: But we are an activist group. We fight for or against issues. We rely on the other groups – such as the John Locke Foundation or the Common Sense Foundation – to provide us with the information and research that we then re-package into retail marketing efforts.

WS: What other issues are you involved with, and – more broadly – what do you think is the prope ){ ^S7C{ ^ c{ ^66K¯ۥ{ ^PD !>}{i4o7hPhLM(A0T! ! XH4O@PD2 !1vZ!eP!\' n.^0$~^ޘx}  zn.^dd9ݤ u@= !>xa+o7hPhLM(A0T! ! HH@@@-01P@ \xBhcJfeJ,BBBB$ 5mX:1WL2~ ]mX;1WL7XA(61~ 1 U "5+!]o)C/<`v_ґh` ] )C)C)C)C  2Kcgrd.og0pD20B  ! 4I30pAf |mY7l"Ri<|dI4arO'\ ex011208.l]gP@H000$I301( $I30@H000$I301( $I30 ex010226.logx)pZvQH ɠH ɠQ## ex010227.log\ww] for government, but we believe that role should be very limited, and not ever-expanding into new things that are being done and can be done in the private sector.

My standard is this: If you can find it in the Yellow Pages, government shouldn’t be doing it. If we would use that as a litmus test of a government program, we could probably save a great deal of money.

Some of our state government processes do need to be reviewed. One of the things we need to be mindful of is the insurance commissioner’s position. The insurance commissioner, while doing a valiant job of trying to help consumers, has gotten to the point that regulation has become the solution to all consumer problems. The long-term impact has been negative. How do you begin to reverse the trend of over-regulation? We need to look at some of the fundamental structures of state government. When you are in an elected position, the easy answer is to try to provide a government program to solve everyone’s problem. Where we run into problems is when politicians make promises in a campaign and then have to figure out ways to keep those promises.