Fungible 1 – A politician’s delight

You need money for schools, roads, and maintaining state employee pension funds. The people do not support a tax increase. How do you make it happen? Well you might try a lottery. But polls show that the people won’t support a lottery whose funds go into the general fund. But they would support the lottery if it was to pay for schools. So you introduce a bill to begin a lottery with the stipulation that ALL of the proceeds will go to education. It passes and most people never realize that it is the same as if the proceeds from the lottery were going into the general fund. Why? Because every dollar that goes from the lottery into education is a dollar that the general fund does not have to put into education. They can then spend it wherever they want to. This is because money is fungible. Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. (Wikipedia)