The lottery is a game in which the odds are against you. Yet people still play it, spending $80 Billion per year on tickets. This money could be better spent on building an emergency fund or paying off credit card debt. But even in the rare chance that someone wins, they are likely to pay enormous taxes on their winnings, and often go bankrupt in a few years.
Lottery commissions try to hide this ugly underbelly by promoting two main messages. One is that it’s fun and you should play for the experience of scratching a ticket. This makes it sound like it’s something people do lightly, when in fact it’s a massively regressive form of gambling that consumes an inordinate amount of the poorer citizens’ incomes.
Another message that lottery commissions promote is the specific benefit of the money it raises for state coffers. This is a cynical claim that obscures the regressivity of lottery revenue by implying that it is somehow different from other forms of gambling and should be treated as a civic duty.
Lottery revenues typically expand dramatically after their introduction, but then level off and eventually begin to decline. This forces lottery managers to introduce new games to maintain or increase revenues. But the introduction of new games usually leads to lower prize amounts and higher odds of winning, which makes the lottery less attractive to many players. This is why there is a constant stream of “experts” promoting systems that are designed to beat the lottery’s odds.