Lottery is a gambling game where people buy tickets for a chance to win money or goods. Prizes can range from a few thousand dollars to a free home, or even a new car. Some lottery games have specific prizes, like units in a subsidized housing block or kindergarten placements at a certain school. Others simply dish out a set amount of cash to paying participants. Americans spend more than $80 billion on lottery tickets every year – money that could be put towards building an emergency savings account or paying down debt.
Lotteries are popular because there’s an inextricable human impulse to gamble and to believe that we’re all going to get rich someday. They dangle the promise of instant riches in an age of inequality and limited social mobility. Billboards on the highway with the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots are a big part of the lure.
State governments use lotteries to raise revenue and promote them as a “low risk” way of investing. But the truth is that lottery players are contributing billions of dollars to government receipts that they would otherwise be saving for retirement or their children’s college tuition.
While there is an obvious benefit for the state that lottery sales bring, I’ve never seen a discussion of how much this revenue really means in the context of overall state revenues. What’s more, the message that lotteries are promoting is a bit misleading – it implies that playing a lottery is an act of civic duty or a contribution to society, which obscures its regressivity and masks how much people spend on tickets.