State lotteries are a means to shift tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.
I can't speak for all of this, but my wife is a teacher and in the last decade she has seen pretty much no correlation between ballot initiatives with claims about giving schools money and meaningful improvements on campus. Usually nothing changes. Other times the money has so many strings attached that whatever changes didn't need to change, and is adjacent to something that obviously did.
People like to say this because it's a nice sound-bite that lets people feel like they themselves are not among the stupid.
It ignores the reality that poverty is a causative agent for lacking the appropriate math skill to recognize that playing the lottery is not a good financial choice, and self-perpetuates that poverty.
Yeah, they figure they're going to be broke by the end of the week anyway, so might as well spend some money on the lotto and at least have the dream that they might win. They don't see a downside, because they don't see a way out of their situation.
Most people buy lotto tickets so they can spend a few minutes in blissful daydream before they come crashing back down to their financial reality. It's like a very cheap drug. It makes them feel good, so it serves a purpose. Feeling good is good.
Having read horror stories of people winning the lottery, I can't even daydream about being rich. I would much rather be an average wage-earner than have my life be destroyed by money.
Can't you just do literally nothing with the money? I think my "being rich" dream is just having my current life but instead of working living off the interest.
Ordering a pizza I otherwise wouldn't have with the money would not be my current life. It's a question of degrees. If I win a 100M lottery and do literally nothing except hand it over to my financial advisor to invest at a modest 4% return and draw a generous 500k salary from that I would still be making 3.5 million compounded compounded per year.
This is more or less how retirement works so it's a pretty well-trodden path.
If that's the heuristic for defining stupid, we better revisit auto insurance, which also has a negative expected value.
On the other hand, maybe variance and skewness (to say nothing of kurtosis) have values (and costs) which a rational analysis needs to consider. Some people might be willing to pay to shed variance, while others might pay to take it on depending on the value of their assets and their time horizon.
I buy power ball or mega millions tickets somewhat often. Like one at a time. The 10 minutes thinking about it after I buy it before I get to my office is plenty worth the $2.
The brain still has fun even knowing not going to win and just spent $2.
If you're poor as dirt, but have five bucks to spare, from a mathematical perspective, you'd be stupid to not put it down on ten-thousand-to-one odds to win 20 grand.
Five dollars won't make any difference in your situation, but twenty thousand would be a life-changing amount of money.
Unfortunately, on a meta level, it's likely that were you to win, you'd go from twenty thousand to zero sooner than you'd like.
>Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.
My gut tells me tax breaks are the exception and more often than not increased revenues are simply paired with boondoggle spending because money is fungible.
Care to back up your assertion with a citation from a non-idealogue source?
PA just had a bridge fall down because the same pattern of funds redirection I described prevented their "fix the roads" gas tax hike from doing more than treading water. The pattern I described is very, very common. My own state had the same problem using cigarette taxes to fund the schools.
Wyoming used that money for a property tax repeal, and NC used that money to get rid of the educational component of corporate taxes. I don't have a good source, sorry.
