Lottery, the game of chance in which people bet money to win a prize, has been around for centuries. The first recorded lotteries were in the Low Countries in the fifteenth century, raising funds for town fortifications and helping the poor. They were popular enough to overcome strong Protestant beliefs against gambling.
In the late twentieth century, as states struggled to maintain services without raising taxes, lottery proponents saw their opportunity. They argued that the games were “budgetary miracles,” allowing them to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with little risk. Cohen notes that New Hampshire’s approval of the first modern state lottery in 1964 helped launch a national wave of pro-lottery activism.
But the real message that lottery marketers have been delivering to voters is different. They now claim that the winnings a player receives will cover a specific line item in a state budget—usually education, but also veteran care or public parks. This narrower argument removes any ethical objection to gambling and allows proponents to say that a vote for lottery is a vote for these important services.
But even this claim obscures how regressive the lottery is. Players earning more than fifty thousand dollars a year spend only one per cent of their income on tickets, while those making less spend thirteen per cent. As a result, lottery winners are disproportionately wealthy, while those who lose overwhelmingly come from lower-income households. In addition, most of the money that lottery winners spend on tickets is not spent on scratch-offs but on the more expensive Powerball and Mega Millions drawings.