There are plenty of people who get sucked into spending more than they can afford on the lottery, to be sure. For most people, it's cheap entertainment. They know they won't win, they understand the odds. They're not idiots or suckers. They're buying a cheap thrill. For a few bucks a week, they get some anticipation and fantasy. The big jackpot tickets are great. For $2 you get a harmless thrill, and you can have those fantasy what-if conversations. Scratchoffs are fun to do, and they offer a ton of small payouts. Everyone always mocks lottery players and assumes they're being duped, but most of them are just buying the only thrill they can afford. Beats crypto.
State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
71–80 of 205 posts
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#72Georgia's lottery[1] is overall a pretty decent system, all things considered. > the lottery takes in over US$1 billion yearly. By law, half of the money goes to prizes, one-third to education, and the remainder to operating and marketing the lottery It pours massive amounts of money into Georgia's education system. It's not perfect but it has put hundreds of thousands of students through school. If we must transfer…
You don't have to transfer anything, though - just get rid of the marketing, take a couple percent to cover administrative expenses, and spend the rest on payouts. If you need money for education, tax people in a fairer way.
> If you need money for education, tax people in a fairer way.
I don't think anyone is compelled to gamble by the Georgia Department of Revenue. This is essentially Georgia saying, "We know we can't stop you from engaging in this vice, so we're at least going to make it beneficial to society in some way." Colorado and a number of other states are doing the same thing with cannabis revenue.
I personally hate gambling, I understand how people get addicted to it, but like illegal drugs it's just a thing that the government can't possibly control. The next least bad thing to do is harness it for good in some fashion.
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#73Georgia's lottery[1] is overall a pretty decent system, all things considered. > the lottery takes in over US$1 billion yearly. By law, half of the money goes to prizes, one-third to education, and the remainder to operating and marketing the lottery It pours massive amounts of money into Georgia's education system. It's not perfect but it has put hundreds of thousands of students through school. If we must transfer…
Well, they're ranked 26th in education, so at best it's just not the worst it could be
That seems overly negative, to me. Being 26th makes them average, and they get to use the money that other states use for education on other things, or lower taxes.
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they're ranked 26th in education, so at best it's just not the worst it could be
That seems overly negative, to me. Being 26th makes them average, and they get to use the money that other states use for education on other things, or lower taxes.
They're heavily subsidized by coastal blue states and they're still 50th percentile.
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#75Being raised in what I believe to be one of these communities this feels very true. In Pennsylvania this supposedly supports seniors, but seniors often are the ones gambling. The most frequent shops for selling lottery tickets are also tobacco stores. I find it hard to resist a scratch off from time to time myself. I don’t know what the solution is, I know it gives people hope and excitement. Even if they think it’s…
> I find it hard to resist a scratch off from time to time myself. As long as you aren't doing it to win but instead to enjoy yourself gambling, and you do it with disposable income, this is fine. Don't beat yourself up for enjoying something mathematically suboptimal. > Even if they think it’s impossible to work themselves out of debt they hope they’ll “win big” one day keeps them going to an extent. It’s really jus…
>As long as you aren't doing it to win but instead to enjoy yourself gambling
What exactly is there to enjoy about a scratch ticket beyond the hope of winning?
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#76There's a simple answer: Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling. The total amount of money transferred to support government programs makes up less than 0.5% of total government revenue; it's trivially replaceable.
>"Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling" What is meant here by "flattening" jackpots? And how does it help?
Ireland has/had an interesting system where they sell bonds where the interest is paid like a sweepstakes.
It’s like buying into a raffle, except you can get your money out.
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#77It’s honestly shocking how many facets of American culture are predicated on addiction for profit. Alcohol, food, social media, gaming, opioids, cannabis, nicotine, gambling. It is extraordinarily difficult to find a sense of perspective independent of the influence of these industries.
It's pretty amazing how the states are in the business of:
booze, tobacco, weed, gambling and gas
Imagine what the total revenue from just those 5 things is? It's got to be like printing cash and yet in most states and cities across the US have crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, underfunded pensions and budget deficits. This is in addition to all their other more regular tax regimes. Where does the money go?
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#78There's an interesting theory that the solution to this is to subsidize the lottery and improve the odds significantly. Take to the extreme and you could essentially implement UBI this way. I also don't think poor people are wrong to think a chance of getting a life-changing amount of money is a worthwhile luxury spend compared to the other available options. They may be wrong about the probability, but instead of fi…
If playing the lottery becomes worthwhile, arbitrageurs will immediately step in until it isn't. Got a lottery ticket with a 10% chance of being worth $100? I'll give you and each of your friends $8.50 for them, guaranteed, today. Lotteries penalize people who are bad at math. It really is that simple.
The claims of “bad at math” ring hollow as Selbee did appear to use statistical analysis and there is a movie being made celebrating those wins.
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner...
But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#79There's a simple answer: Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling. The total amount of money transferred to support government programs makes up less than 0.5% of total government revenue; it's trivially replaceable.
So remove the very reason why people pay the lottery in the first place?
I actually think this is a good idea as long as the gov keeps the ban on black market lotteries
Re: State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
#80The argument for the state having a monopoly on lotteries is that if there wasn’t a legal lottery illegal lotteries would proliferate. Thus to protect people, the state should run it as it would then be guaranteed to be fair and free of the criminal element (mobsters, etc.). Ideally, the lotto would just take in enough to pay the winners and administrative expenses. However, most states have abused this monopoly and…
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