5 ms·

Lottery should be illegal. It is a luck-based system to concentrate and redistribute wealth from individuals (often lower class) to a single member of the socie

Lottery should be illegal. It is a luck-based system to concentrate and redistribute wealth from individuals (often lower class) to a single member of the society; propelling one person from the lower echelons of the society to the top at the expense of others. We want to align some kind of a productive output and reasonable incentives for a person to justify amassing so much wealth.

arcticbull 6y ago
While I agree, I very much enjoy gambling because it is fun, and gets me the dopamine hit I'm after :)
TrainedMonkey 6y ago
A lot of fun things are fundamentally unproductive, risk taking and surprises that playing the lottery entail are fun to a lot of people.
gt565k 6y ago
Which is why in the US at least, most states take about 40-50% of the lottery winnings to fund education programs. In Georgia, we have the HOPE scholarship which is funded by the Georgia Lottery. If you have a good GPA in high school, and you maintain it in college, you basically get a free ride and don't have to pay tuition. While the HOPE scholarship can probably be tailored, more towards the household income, from a distribution perspective, it still works well. It allowed myself and many of my peers to graduate with significantly less debt than if we had to pay for college ourselves.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  True, but it still amounts to a very regressive tax, even if the proceeds are fed back into education.
  - taeric 6y ago
    The cynic in me notes that the stock exchange amounts to where moderate to middle class does all of their gambling. With most of the proceeds just consolidating up the wealth chain. At least in lotteries the programs are progressive. :D
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      If you buy and hold stocks for a long time it's not the same thing as betting on a horse or buying a lottery ticket.
    - brlewis 6y ago
      That's different. The average "gambler" in the stock exchange comes out ahead.
- stygiansonic 6y ago
  Funding the public education system is a good thing and a similar system exists in California: https://www.calottery.com/who-benefits https://www.calottery.com/who-benefits However OPs point about mostly lower socioeconomic groups funding the lottery is still relevant as it raises questions about whether this pseudo-regressive “tax” is a fair way to fund a public good like education.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    In all fairness, in the US--at least where I live--the bulk of education funding comes from property taxes which is presumably progressive. (There is a different criticism that this leads to wealthier towns having better education. Which is probably true at some level although there isn't a lot of correlation between per pupil spend and educational outcomes in a given area.)
    - scarmig 6y ago
      Property taxes aren't progressive: although they're levied on individuals who tend to be well-off, a significant proportion of those costs end up passed on to renters. Additionally, poorer people tend to spend a larger portion of their income on housing (be it rent or otherwise) than the rich.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        That's fair enough and probably depends on the housing prices in a location. Wealthier people tend to own more house but it may still be a smaller portion of their income, depending upon where they live.
- rudedogg 6y ago
  States do this when they pass gambling laws to make it seem less scummy in my opinion. My state recently made certain slot machine games legal. I found myself overlooking the parking lot of one of the casinos at 8am while waiting for my grocery pickup. The addicts were already arriving. Somehow every car seemed to have been in an accident and not been repaired. The parking lot was covered in oil stains. When the casinos opened I imagined people going out occasionally for a fun night gambling. This was far from that.
- zerocrates 6y ago
  The trouble with earmarking like this is that the legislature takes it into account when distributing funds, so you can easily have a situation where "all proceeds from the lottery go to education" but you don't actually have any more education funding than you did before. A specific, new, fully funded program like a scholarship is actually possibly a better form of this than just general funding for the school system.
- AaronM 6y ago
  In a fair number of states, its funny math. They don't increase the size of the budget, they just shift the money around. So if lottery revenue goes up for the state, more of the education budget may come from lottery money vs taxes, but the overall budget remains the same.
  - claar 6y ago
    Exactly. "Please vote for our 1% sales tax increase! It's all going to education, we swear! Think of the children!" Well sure, you're allocating the new dollars to education, then moving the old allocations over to your pet project...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Which is used to argue for reduced progressive (or even flat) tax-based support for schools.
- mabbo 6y ago
  > most states take about 40-50% of the lottery winnings to fund education programs. In Georgia, we have the HOPE scholarship which is funded by the Georgia Lottery. My father and I once debated the merits of this, and he made a point that stuck with me: the overall funding for education didn't change. It's just that the money that used to come from the government now comes from lotteries instead. Meaning the burden of that cost has shifted from the collected taxes, which is more proportionally paid by the rich, to the lottery system which is more proportionally paid by the poor.
  - sampo 6y ago
    Did the amount of money the poor invest in gambling change? Or are the gambling losses just being re-targeted to fund education, instead whatever they used to end up in previously.
    - mabbo 6y ago
      That's a fun point! I am 100% going to bring that up with the old man the next time we're allowed in the same room[0]. I think he'll like it. [0] Covid risks...
- listenallyall 6y ago
  HOPE scholarships are great PR but awful policy. Basically, the poorest people in Georgia are paying for the children of mostly middle and upper-class residents to go to UGA and Ga Tech for free. Of course the state points out the handful of low-income students who also benefited from a HOPE scholarship, but these are the minority of recipients, and they would almost all have qualified for significant grants and financial aid anyway. The most offensive aspect, I'll state again, is the fact that the poorest residents overwhelmingly purchase lottery tickets while the wealthiest residents overwhelmingly receive the scholarships. It also makes the state university (UGA) much, much harder to gain admission to, since demand for a free college education is high. Applications (and thus necessary GPA/SAT scores) are through the roof... Ivy-qualified students (again, often from wealthy families) are often encouraged to go to UGA for free instead. HOPE already vastly exceeded its budget once, leading to cutbacks and reforms about a decade ago, with many students losing scholarships or suddenly not qualifiying. A more recent report says it is likely to run out of funds again in 2028. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/new-analysis-shows-hope-scholarship-to-run-out-of-money-by-2028/293407419 https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/new-analysis-show...
fartcannon 6y ago
It would seem to me that all wealth is at the expense of others. I like your comment, but I think it needs to account for the fact that non-lottery wealth comes from either being lucky (born into it, or first to market) or by taking from other people.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  That seems a little too pessimistic to me. The economy is absolutely not a zero sum game.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    Looked at individual transactions within the economy - i.e. how this thread is looking at the lottery - those do appear to be zero sum in the same way.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  It's usually other people voluntarily give it to them, not that they take it. First to market isn't just luck. It's often the result of work harder and faster and taking more risk than others. It's not as if Bill Gates just sat around and told people to make software.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_b 6y ago
That is true only if making lotteries illegal made them nonexistent. In the United States, the legal lottery is arguably better than the widespread (illegal) "numbers game" it replaced.
- brlewis 6y ago
  It's also arguably worse. It adds a conflict of interest that the "numbers game" never had. The same government that is responsible for providing an education that makes people resistant to the lottery has an interest in people being vulnerable to the lottery.
  - hangonhn 6y ago
    In my home state of Florida, it's pretty nefarious because they often advertise that the proceeds are used to support education. While that is true, they also removed other sources of funds such as taxes. So in the end the funding level is about the same while less of it comes from taxes. This means Florida can tax people less to pay for education but as other have pointed out, the lottery is essentially a tax on stupidity or at least innumeracy. I guess using an innumeracy tax to fund education is kind of poetic but what Florida has done is tax the uneducated to give tax cuts to everyone else.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    I don't believe that lottery players are unintelligent or uneducated. It's rational to play the lottery if you believe that it's the only way to make a significant economic change to your life. That's a bigger problem than just education provision.
    - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      >It's rational to play the lottery if you believe that it's the only way to make a significant economic change to your life. But that belief is irrational. There are a ton of better ways to make a significant economic change to your life with $1 each week than through playing the lottery. $1 each week is $52 a year, you can buy classes, learn skills, etc. with that money and the time you spend watching numbers get called out.
bawolff 6y ago
I more think its a system to tax the poor without them being mad about it.
alacombe 6y ago
> Lottery should be illegal. Fortunately, we can always rely on crime syndicates to provide unrestricted access to vices (either gambling, sex, booze, or drugs) for as long as people will want it, no matter what Rulers and other "pezzonovante" think of such a vices. Said otherwise, you can not change, and will not change, human nature.
onion2k 6y ago
To put lottery winnings in to context, the biggest ever lottery win in the US was $1.56bn, or approximately 0.84% of Jeff Bezos's current wealth.
habosa 6y ago
It's a high risk and very high variance bet. The odds are terrible but for 99.999% of people it's the only bet you can make with "instantly project me into the top echelon of wealth" levels of upside. There's value in that which is not captured by the negative expected value. Finance professionals have access to this kind of bet outside the lottery via leverage and complex derivatives and they place bets all the time. Earlier this year Bill Ackman made 2.6B on a really wacky bet against corporate debt [0]. The lottery is absolutely a waste of money for most people, but if you're rational about it you can see it as an opportunity that has no replacement. 0: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-ackman-billionaire-made-2-6-billion-coronavirus-meltdown/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-ackman-billionaire-made-2-...
cal5k 6y ago
> We want to align some kind of a productive output and reasonable incentives for a person to justify amassing so much wealth. Or maybe it's just fun to play, and people can make their own choices? Frankly, I think governments should not be in the business of attempting to engineer "desirable" outcomes through coercion. Invest the money that would have been spent on coercion/crackdowns on education and then let people live with the consequences of their actions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

arcticbull 6y ago

While I agree, I very much enjoy gambling because it is fun, and gets me the dopamine hit I'm after :)

TrainedMonkey 6y ago

A lot of fun things are fundamentally unproductive, risk taking and surprises that playing the lottery entail are fun to a lot of people.

gt565k 6y ago

Which is why in the US at least, most states take about 40-50% of the lottery winnings to fund education programs. In Georgia, we have the HOPE scholarship which is funded by the Georgia Lottery. If you have a good GPA in high school, and you maintain it in college, you basically get a free ride and don't have to pay tuition. While the HOPE scholarship can probably be tailored, more towards the household income, from a distribution perspective, it still works well. It allowed myself and many of my peers to graduate with significantly less debt than if we had to pay for college ourselves.

rootusrootus 6y ago
True, but it still amounts to a very regressive tax, even if the proceeds are fed back into education.
- taeric 6y ago
  The cynic in me notes that the stock exchange amounts to where moderate to middle class does all of their gambling. With most of the proceeds just consolidating up the wealth chain. At least in lotteries the programs are progressive. :D
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    If you buy and hold stocks for a long time it's not the same thing as betting on a horse or buying a lottery ticket.
  - brlewis 6y ago
    That's different. The average "gambler" in the stock exchange comes out ahead.
stygiansonic 6y ago
Funding the public education system is a good thing and a similar system exists in California: https://www.calottery.com/who-benefits https://www.calottery.com/who-benefits However OPs point about mostly lower socioeconomic groups funding the lottery is still relevant as it raises questions about whether this pseudo-regressive “tax” is a fair way to fund a public good like education.
- ghaff 6y ago
  In all fairness, in the US--at least where I live--the bulk of education funding comes from property taxes which is presumably progressive. (There is a different criticism that this leads to wealthier towns having better education. Which is probably true at some level although there isn't a lot of correlation between per pupil spend and educational outcomes in a given area.)
  - scarmig 6y ago
    Property taxes aren't progressive: although they're levied on individuals who tend to be well-off, a significant proportion of those costs end up passed on to renters. Additionally, poorer people tend to spend a larger portion of their income on housing (be it rent or otherwise) than the rich.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      That's fair enough and probably depends on the housing prices in a location. Wealthier people tend to own more house but it may still be a smaller portion of their income, depending upon where they live.
rudedogg 6y ago
States do this when they pass gambling laws to make it seem less scummy in my opinion. My state recently made certain slot machine games legal. I found myself overlooking the parking lot of one of the casinos at 8am while waiting for my grocery pickup. The addicts were already arriving. Somehow every car seemed to have been in an accident and not been repaired. The parking lot was covered in oil stains. When the casinos opened I imagined people going out occasionally for a fun night gambling. This was far from that.
zerocrates 6y ago
The trouble with earmarking like this is that the legislature takes it into account when distributing funds, so you can easily have a situation where "all proceeds from the lottery go to education" but you don't actually have any more education funding than you did before. A specific, new, fully funded program like a scholarship is actually possibly a better form of this than just general funding for the school system.
AaronM 6y ago
In a fair number of states, its funny math. They don't increase the size of the budget, they just shift the money around. So if lottery revenue goes up for the state, more of the education budget may come from lottery money vs taxes, but the overall budget remains the same.
- claar 6y ago
  Exactly. "Please vote for our 1% sales tax increase! It's all going to education, we swear! Think of the children!" Well sure, you're allocating the new dollars to education, then moving the old allocations over to your pet project...
dredmorbius 6y ago
Which is used to argue for reduced progressive (or even flat) tax-based support for schools.
mabbo 6y ago
> most states take about 40-50% of the lottery winnings to fund education programs. In Georgia, we have the HOPE scholarship which is funded by the Georgia Lottery. My father and I once debated the merits of this, and he made a point that stuck with me: the overall funding for education didn't change. It's just that the money that used to come from the government now comes from lotteries instead. Meaning the burden of that cost has shifted from the collected taxes, which is more proportionally paid by the rich, to the lottery system which is more proportionally paid by the poor.
- sampo 6y ago
  Did the amount of money the poor invest in gambling change? Or are the gambling losses just being re-targeted to fund education, instead whatever they used to end up in previously.
  - mabbo 6y ago
    That's a fun point! I am 100% going to bring that up with the old man the next time we're allowed in the same room[0]. I think he'll like it. [0] Covid risks...
listenallyall 6y ago
HOPE scholarships are great PR but awful policy. Basically, the poorest people in Georgia are paying for the children of mostly middle and upper-class residents to go to UGA and Ga Tech for free. Of course the state points out the handful of low-income students who also benefited from a HOPE scholarship, but these are the minority of recipients, and they would almost all have qualified for significant grants and financial aid anyway. The most offensive aspect, I'll state again, is the fact that the poorest residents overwhelmingly purchase lottery tickets while the wealthiest residents overwhelmingly receive the scholarships. It also makes the state university (UGA) much, much harder to gain admission to, since demand for a free college education is high. Applications (and thus necessary GPA/SAT scores) are through the roof... Ivy-qualified students (again, often from wealthy families) are often encouraged to go to UGA for free instead. HOPE already vastly exceeded its budget once, leading to cutbacks and reforms about a decade ago, with many students losing scholarships or suddenly not qualifiying. A more recent report says it is likely to run out of funds again in 2028. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/new-analysis-shows-hope-scholarship-to-run-out-of-money-by-2028/293407419 https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/new-analysis-show...

fartcannon 6y ago

It would seem to me that all wealth is at the expense of others. I like your comment, but I think it needs to account for the fact that non-lottery wealth comes from either being lucky (born into it, or first to market) or by taking from other people.

rootusrootus 6y ago
That seems a little too pessimistic to me. The economy is absolutely not a zero sum game.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  Looked at individual transactions within the economy - i.e. how this thread is looking at the lottery - those do appear to be zero sum in the same way.
lopmotr 6y ago
It's usually other people voluntarily give it to them, not that they take it. First to market isn't just luck. It's often the result of work harder and faster and taking more risk than others. It's not as if Bill Gates just sat around and told people to make software.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

_b 6y ago

That is true only if making lotteries illegal made them nonexistent. In the United States, the legal lottery is arguably better than the widespread (illegal) "numbers game" it replaced.

brlewis 6y ago
It's also arguably worse. It adds a conflict of interest that the "numbers game" never had. The same government that is responsible for providing an education that makes people resistant to the lottery has an interest in people being vulnerable to the lottery.
- hangonhn 6y ago
  In my home state of Florida, it's pretty nefarious because they often advertise that the proceeds are used to support education. While that is true, they also removed other sources of funds such as taxes. So in the end the funding level is about the same while less of it comes from taxes. This means Florida can tax people less to pay for education but as other have pointed out, the lottery is essentially a tax on stupidity or at least innumeracy. I guess using an innumeracy tax to fund education is kind of poetic but what Florida has done is tax the uneducated to give tax cuts to everyone else.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  I don't believe that lottery players are unintelligent or uneducated. It's rational to play the lottery if you believe that it's the only way to make a significant economic change to your life. That's a bigger problem than just education provision.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    >It's rational to play the lottery if you believe that it's the only way to make a significant economic change to your life. But that belief is irrational. There are a ton of better ways to make a significant economic change to your life with $1 each week than through playing the lottery. $1 each week is $52 a year, you can buy classes, learn skills, etc. with that money and the time you spend watching numbers get called out.

bawolff 6y ago

I more think its a system to tax the poor without them being mad about it.

alacombe 6y ago

> Lottery should be illegal. Fortunately, we can always rely on crime syndicates to provide unrestricted access to vices (either gambling, sex, booze, or drugs) for as long as people will want it, no matter what Rulers and other "pezzonovante" think of such a vices. Said otherwise, you can not change, and will not change, human nature.

onion2k 6y ago

To put lottery winnings in to context, the biggest ever lottery win in the US was $1.56bn, or approximately 0.84% of Jeff Bezos's current wealth.

habosa 6y ago

It's a high risk and very high variance bet. The odds are terrible but for 99.999% of people it's the only bet you can make with "instantly project me into the top echelon of wealth" levels of upside. There's value in that which is not captured by the negative expected value. Finance professionals have access to this kind of bet outside the lottery via leverage and complex derivatives and they place bets all the time. Earlier this year Bill Ackman made 2.6B on a really wacky bet against corporate debt [0]. The lottery is absolutely a waste of money for most people, but if you're rational about it you can see it as an opportunity that has no replacement. 0: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-ackman-billionaire-made-2-6-billion-coronavirus-meltdown/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-ackman-billionaire-made-2-...

cal5k 6y ago

> We want to align some kind of a productive output and reasonable incentives for a person to justify amassing so much wealth. Or maybe it's just fun to play, and people can make their own choices? Frankly, I think governments should not be in the business of attempting to engineer "desirable" outcomes through coercion. Invest the money that would have been spent on coercion/crackdowns on education and then let people live with the consequences of their actions.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]