Lottery Lowers Scholarship Goal, Shows Evidence of Poor Management

Arkansas Lottery

The Arkansas Lottery is “a success story” compared to other state lotteries, but it’s reducing its college scholarship budget for the year.

That’s what lottery officials said in a meeting yesterday. The Arkansas Lottery is reducing scholarship projections for 2014 by roughly $6.8 million. This tracks with what we wrote last week about how the Arkansas Lottery is on target to come in nearly $8 million under budget on scholarships this year.

If you read the news coverage from yesterday’s meeting, it seems as if lottery officials are ready to blame the budget shortfall on everything and everybody except themselves. The lottery is allegedly struggling because they can’t accept credit or debit cards; because they can’t sell lottery tickets online; because they can’t do monitor games; because scratch-off ticket sales are down; and because they took a loss on a new raffle game.

But lottery officials say Arkansas’ lottery is “a success story” compared to other state lotteries, because we are sixteenth out of forty-five states in lottery ticket sales, per-capita.

Something about those statements just doesn’t add up.

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Arkansas Mom Sues the Government

Current Events

The following blog post is by Family Council staff member Deborah Beuerman.

Robert Longley reports the Obama administration apparently does not support a woman-owned business that helps financially-struggling parents buy children’s clothing at affordable prices.

Rhea Lana Riner of Conway founded her children’s clothing consignment sale business, Rhea Lana’s, Inc, to enable parents and other family members sell children’s clothing to other families.

“At Rhea Lana’s sales, people selling items on consignment were offered the option to volunteer to assist at the event in return for a chance to shop before the sale opens to the public. During the sales, the volunteers performed general tasks such as greeting shoppers, picking up fallen price tags, reorganizing items that shoppers have handled, and assisting shoppers with carrying items to their vehicles.”

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) says that is against the law and banned Rhea Lana’s from allowing volunteers to assist at its sales. The DOL says the volunteers were actually Rhea Lana’s “employees” under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and as such should have been paid and are now entitled to back pay in accordance with FLSA minimum wage provisions.

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Are You a CIS Male or CIS Female?

Homosexuality, ,

The title may be confusing, but you are one or the other–or maybe one of the 56 other “gender identities.”

If you have a Facebook account, and are uncertain of your gender, you can now choose from one of 58 gender identities–another check mark for gay activists, as far as their movement is concerned.

Of course, the issue is much larger than recognizing 58 different types of “gender.” Tying gender to anything other than biology complicates society and carries a number of unintended consequences, as we’ve written about in the past.

Click here to read more.

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