My father once won $100,000 from a scratch off ticket. It was a $20.00 scratch off ticket. I gave him crap for years over it because between playing Keno, and buying other scratch offs, he's probably spent close to that trying to recreate the effect.<p>The thing is, he's very serious about his lottery. He enters every losing ticket into a second chance registration on Maryland's lottery site. (This was how I got him to start using the internet, actually) He won a few times and knows what he's losing. He's not bad at math. He's not rich either, he lives off of a very small military pension and has a job filling vending machines on a route.<p>I've pressed him again and again about how stupid the lottery is. I've pointed out the math, the bad odds, the addictive design of the games.. you name it. His answer remains the same. A shrug and "It's fun." I have since realized after spending afternoons with him at the places he likes to play, that it's his own odd social network. He knows all the employees, the other regulars. He complains about politics to the other players. He sweet talks the old ladies behind the counter. It's his excuse to leave the house. He keeps making his mortgage payments, keeps making his wife dinner every night, and takes care of his mother. If he wants to blow his fun-money on lottery at this point, I've just quit arguing with him and I go play with him when I visit. Losing 40 bucks to spend the afternoon with my old man is a bargain, in my eyes.
"When you play the lottery, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But it's better than using drugs or alcohol because when you use drugs or alcohol, you always lose" - "American Movie"<p>People who don't play the lottery are always so quick to dismiss it. They disregard how accessible it is - you don't need a next-gen console or flat-screen tv, just cash - as they disregard how independently fun it is - you could be sitting alone in a dark room with nothing but a lottery ticket in your hand and be perfectly satisfied with fantasies of winning. It's like discussing guns with people who will never use them.<p>Let's not get too carried away by sensationalism and look at this from a bird's-eye view: lotteries are great sources of revenue (better than state corporate income taxes? Holy cow!), they are low-health-risk (someone may need treatment for gambling addiction but it never hurts their lungs or livers), and they are easy to scale up and down.<p>If the regressive-tax-on-the-poor argument is too convincing for you to resist, then here's a solution: register lottery purchases so you can only buy $X in lottery tickets based on your $Y income. Just don't come crying to me when the state comes for your income and property taxes to make up the difference...
Really, people should pause before calling behavior that does not conform to their model or their own preferences "irrational".<p>The typical argument goes like "Expected monetary payoff is negative, therefore buying a lottery ticket an irrational decision" -- but this ignores, for example, the possibility of winning a life-changing prize, that would provide enjoyment far above and beyond what e.g. investing money spent on lottery would, and there is no reason why this possibility cannot compensate for the expected loss. Technically speaking, claims of irrationality implicitly rely on assumption of concavity of preferences, but there are good reasons to think that it's not always correct.
This issue boils down to the proper function of government: ensure people's freedom to act as they wish (barring negative impact on others), or enforce the "healthiest" behavior?<p>Yes, buying lottery tickets for any reason other than entertainment is irrational. But does that mean it shouldn't be allowed? People are <i>choosing</i> to spend their money like this.<p>Personally, I prefer a government that lets people do stupid things -- e.g. buying a lottery ticket with the expectation of winning -- to a government that paternalistically enforces middle-class norms.
I would never think of playing the lottery or engaging in any other form of gambling because I understand the odds are always in favor of the house. I understand that I'm going to lose money. What a terrible irony that we fund public education with a lottery that relies on participation by those who don't understand basic math?<p>But I see this as part of a larger trend of preying on the poor. Watching far-right media, I see poor people being told to invest heavily in gold, reverse mortgages, guns, and raging them up into sending all their money to political organizations whose sole purpose is to take money from the angry. And there are plenty of examples on the left as well (people investing in college degrees for the sake of college degrees without any idea if their field of study is a good investment or not). I don't know how we break these cycles and inspire low-income American citizens to temper their emotions and rationally invest in their futures.
A lottery is a better investment than other crap the poor often buy. Crack, TVs, xboxes, alcohol all have a EROI of 0. A lottery at least is >0 . Better would be if we sold partials of VT(I) in the store at lottery ticket prices. $2 for a near 0 chance at 1B, or $2 for a near 100% chance at $4 given enough time.
>According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, lotteries took in $70.1 billion in sales in the 2014 fiscal year. That’s more than Americans in all 50 states spent on sports tickets, books, video games, movie tickets, and recorded music sales.<p>One should be careful when making this sort of comparison-- at least from the standpoint of the overall economy. The cost of "producing the lottery" is more or less fixed relative to its revenue, i.e. its marginal cost is free, but it's not necessarily free for the other good they're comparing it to. For consumers to increase the number of movie tickets they buy or books they buy, more theaters have to be built or books have to be printed. The cost of producing the extra consumption goods is relevant, precisely because there is nearly zero cost of producing the consumer good that is a lotto ticket.<p>In other words, money is changing hands (mainly from the poor people's hands into the government's and from there who knows), but resources are not being consumed like they would be if we were constructing new movie theaters all over town. That particular aspect of the lottery is actually praiseworthy and might be missed by a simple comparison of consumer spending on it vs "all these other forms of entertainment combined".
For me lotteries is one of the reason, I have grown skeptical of State.<p>1. They Lie, Lie about funding schools and lottery is the only way to do it.<p>2. Lie about the Prize money, the advertisements of lottery are untruthful and a private entity would be charged with fraud.<p>3. The practice of gaming the game, i.e. they try to make lotteries popular and sink a lot of money for advertising, they claim 50% goes for prizes but of the remaining 50% a lot goes to advertising than going to schools.<p>4. Taxing the winning, splitting the wins. Even if you win, you will be short-charged depending on the number of winners.<p>5. Exclude non-State entities from having their own lotteries, State monopoly.<p>6. Corporate tax cuts are pretty much common in states that aggressively promote lottery, lotto and video poker.<p>Even if it is entertainment, which it is not, Government should not be in it. I am not against lotteries, they need to competitive and have should have a level transparency, that is currently lacking since the law makers are the law breakers.
I don't see it as preying on the poor. I see it as a hobby / investment of the poor due to thousands of other factors that already prey on the poor.<p>Imagine you have 0 chance of having any savings and barely staying ahead on your mortgage. The breakdown is this:<p>upper class: easy access to what you want and need
middle class: easy access to what you need
lower class: difficult access to what you need<p>If you are never going to have disposable income and forever be barely a paycheck ahead, what investments are available to you? You raise your child as well as you can for the school district and streets you live on, at best they go to a low-tier state school -> more debt. You can't retrain for a job because you are half a paycheck away from needing to take a second job.<p>In this situation, the outcomes are this:
don't play lottery -> 100% stay poor
play lottery -> 99.99999% stay poor<p>what do you choose?
The poor do a lot of dumb things: They don't track their money, they rack up credit card debt, they don't plan to minimize taxes, they depend on payday loans and check cashing services, they drink and smoke and do drugs, they constantly overdraft their bank accounts, they spend too much on entertainment, etc. The middle class are better with this, mainly because they have more money and so are less likely to be fined for non-payment.<p>I know some family approaching 60 who are still paying off the house, 2 cars, and an RV. If that wasn't bad enough, they play the lottery every week because "somebody has to win".<p>I still think we should abolish social security, but after seeing countless examples of people racking up debt buying stuff they don't need and then depending on it in old age to avoid starving, it's almost enough to make me think it has some merit.<p>I feel like that entire line of thought with government-enforced retirement accounts leads to increasing taxes on the poor since they can't be trusted to responsibly spend it. Which actually might be what a lottery is.
Duplicate from two days ago: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteries-americas-70-billion-shame/392870/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotterie...</a>
The government runs lotteries because otherwise criminal organizations would. Now if only the US government would apply this same 'harm reduction' strategy to other 'crimes' like marijuana use.
Lotteries are really a great wait for the state to collect taxes. Unfortunately the way the are currently handled results in too much profiteering/skimming/corruption.
I'm pretty sure we let the government run the lotteries here in the US because it's a lot better than when the gangs would run them. It's much the same argument for drug legalization, really... if people are going to be stupid, and you know they're going to be stupid, at least help them be smart about being stupid.