Mass. treasurer proposes slots, privatizing lottery

Tim Cahill's solution to our financial mess in Mass is to offer more lottery and slot machines. How about this for an idea, how about cutting the waste from the government. That would be a novel idea that might actually work...

Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill proposed privatizing the state lottery and licensing thousands of slot machines to quickly raise billions of dollars for the financially ailing state.

Cahill, whose office oversees the lottery, said on Wednesday the state could raise as much as $1 billion by selling a 50-year license to a private company to run the lottery, which had $4.7 billion in sales last year.

After the up-front payment, a privatized lottery would bring in as much as $900 million a year for the state, he told the Boston Chamber of Commerce.

Cahill also proposed selling the rights to three big slot machine parlors, which could bring in as much as $3.35 billion up front and as much as $243 million annually by collecting a 27 percent tax on the machines' revenue.

He said slot machine parlors should be built first, and privatizing the lottery should be considered after that.

"This is a pretty sure (revenue) thing," Cahill said after unveiling his plan to place as many as 9,000 slot machines across the state to attract Massachusetts residents who now gamble in neighboring Rhode Island and Connecticut.