How Marriage Is Helping Us Through COVID

COVID-19, Marriage, ,
John Stonestreet, Radio Host and President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

National Review recently pointed to new research that suggests married couples are best positioned to weather the emotional and financial storms of the COVID-19 pandemic. It sounds like common sense: Married people are much less likely to report feeling lonely or isolated (despite the social distancing) and are also more financially stable than those living on their own. They also tend to have wider family networks to rely on in times of trouble.

Of course, none of this suggests that married people are morally superior to single people, or that marriage is a guarantee for success. What it does reinforce, yet again, is the truth that marriage is a good thing, not a tool of patriarchal oppression or a loss of freedom, as we so often hear. And it suggests that the decline of marriage is not a healthy trend.

And, this study should remind us married folks to look out for friends, neighbors and family who live alone.

Copyright 2020 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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State Lottery Rolls Out Even More Scratch-Off Tickets

Arkansas Lottery

Last week the Arkansas Lottery unveiled a new lineup of scratch-off tickets that sell for anywhere from $1 to $20 each.

The tickets are:

  • X10 Multiplier (Cost: $1)
  • X20 Multiplier (Cost: $2)
  • X50 Multiplier (Cost: $5)
  • Cool Cash (Cost: $10)
  • $50,000 Payout (Cost: $20)

These scratch-off tickets offer notoriously bad odds.

Players who fork over $20 for a $50,000 Payout ticket stand to lose their money two-thirds of the time.

The odds of winning the $50,000 top prize are a staggering 1 in 20,000.

And the odds of winning even $1 from the X10 Multiplier ticket are not good — roughly a 1 in 5 chance.

As we have written many times, scratch-off tickets are controversial, because they are tied to problem gambling and gambling addiction.

A 2015 study in Canada described them as “paper slot machines.” 

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions found a link between how often a person played scratch-off tickets and the severity of a person’s gambling problem.

Expensive scratch-off tickets — like the Lottery’s new $10 and $20 tickets — are particularly controversial, because they prey on the poor and desperate by offering long odds on big prizes.

The Arkansas Lottery seems to be in a never-ending cycle of consistently rolling out new lottery games to prop up ticket sales and entice people to gamble.

Despite all of this, the Arkansas Lottery gives Arkansas’ college students only a fraction of the money that it makes.

Most of the Lottery’s revenue pays for prizes that few lottery players ever win.

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