State Lottery Spends Another $7K on Travel in September

Arkansas Lottery

Based on information from the state’s transparency website, the Arkansas Lottery spent approximately $7,000 reimbursing employees for mileage expenses in September, and a little over $30,000 total on mileage since July 1.

State employees receive 42 cents for every mile they travel on state business in their personal vehicles; some employees average hundreds of dollars every month in reimbursement for their mileage. The Arkansas Lottery probably could save a lot of money by using state vehicles for travel instead of paying employees to drive their personal vehicles.

The Arkansas Lottery spends about 70% – 71% of its revenue on prizes for lottery players. About 16% – 17% goes to scholarships. The rest of the money pays for Lottery operations.

For perspective, the typical state lottery spends about 60% of its revenue on prizes and 30% on education. If the Lottery followed this model, it would be able to provide millions of dollars in additional scholarship funding.

Eleven years running, the Arkansas Lottery continues to budget its money poorly.

Photo Credit: Airtuna08 at English Wikipedia [CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

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First the Uighurs, Now the Tibetans

China
John Stonestreet, Radio Host and President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

If anyone understands the slogan, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” it’s the Chinese Communist Party. Having imprisoned millions of Uighurs in concentration camps to eradicate their religious and ethnic identity with only a bit of moderate resistance from the rest of the world, Beijing saw what they could get away with. After all, they didn’t even lose the 2022 Winter Olympics!

Now the party is using the same playbook to deal with another troublesome religious and ethnic minority: Tibetans. So far in 2020, Beijing has pushed “more than 500,000 [Tibetan] rural laborers into recently built military-style training centers.”

It’s being called a “vocational training” program, which is Chinese Newspeak for “forced labor.” The goal is to reform “backward thinking,” and turn Tibetan speakers into Chinese ones.

The only way China changes is if it pays a real price, an economic one. If not, Beijing’s “business as usual” will target more religious minorities, including Christians.

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

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