Also while lottery money might go to schools that just means the state doesn't have to fund the school system as much and can take that money they would have bu

Also while lottery money might go to schools that just means the state doesn't have to fund the school system as much and can take that money they would have budgeted for the schools and put it elsewhere. In the end it results in a net-neutral for schools in a lot of cases. Money earmarked for specific things really has no bearing if the amount of money earmarked is less than or equal to the funding requirements of the thing it's earmarked for. For example, using 100% made up numbers, let's pretend the school budget is $100M and the lottery brings in $50M. Well that just means we can now take $50M from the school budget and use it for other things and combine $50M from the "state budget" and $50M from the "earmarked lottery revenue" and fund the schools for $100M. Now if the lottery brings in over $100M then the schools could get more but I'm not sure if that's happening anywhere.