A DOLLAR, A DREAM.(Arkansas state legislator Jim Lendall proposes that state gamble on lottery)

Budget crises are traditionally good news for gamblers. Determined not to raise taxes in the face of a severe deficit that promises unpopular spending cuts--zoos and firehouses closed, garbage and schoolchildren left behind--Governor George Pataki last week proposed that the city install video slot machines in its Off-Track Betting parlors. Aspiring millionaires would be spared having to ride the A train to the far reaches of Queens to play the slots at Aqueduct racetrack--which were themselves approved during the previous budget crisis, in 2001--and the state treasury would take in a few hundred million bucks. Everybody wins. But what would a solution be without a spoilsport? "There's no free lunch in life, and I think one of the problems of using gambling as a way to balance the budget is that it has a cost,"Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last month to the aptly named radio host John Gambling.

When it comes to budget balancing, however, the best innovations often turn up in statehouses far from Albany. As it happens, a progressive assemblyman in Arkansas addressed his own state's budget shortfall this year by proposing a different kind of gambling bill--one that would set aside three thousand dollars annually for the state itself to play the lottery. That is, Arkansas would buy lottery tickets in other states, with the idea that a wellordered sequence of birthday and wedding-anniversary dates might, with some luck, fill the coffers in Little Rock. "For the few remaining states, like Arkansas, too righteous to establish their own lotteries, investing in lotteries is merely taking advantage of other states' immorality,"Jim Lendall, the bill's author, explained. (Arkansas's governor would be entrusted with the responsibility of buying the tickets--and, presumably, of selecting the lucky digits.) "We, as legislators, must look at creative ways to meet the demands by the public for state services."

Lendall, who is a registered nurse in addition to being a state assemblyman, is not exactly Bill Bennett (among other things, he is a liberal Democrat who has ...