Hacker News Reader

Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

State lotteries are a scam and a tax on the poor. They should be made outright illegal by the federal government. The money collected by them is usually earmarked for one thing, used for that purpose for a while, and then raided for some other pet project.

Add to this the fact that lottery winners are usually no better off a few years after winning and I can't see any reason why the state should sponsor them.

View on HN

I think the idea is that if you legalize games of chance and have them run by the state, the rules are at least fair and there is some level of oversight that prevents people from being completely taken advantage of. The games of chance are still fundamentally unfair, but it's a 60/40 kind of unfair instead of 80/20.

In the absence of state lotteries, people with gambling problems would just find another way to gamble that supports organized crime rather than the state.

> I think the idea is that if you legalize games of chance and have them run by the state, the rules are at least fair and there is some level of oversight that prevents people from being completely taken advantage of.

In NL we just had a huge scandal with the legal lottery being essentially a rigged game with far less chance of paying out than they would have you believe. (This does not affect me because I've never put a red cent towards a lottery but I can see how those that felt that the state could be trusted in this respect feel more than a little let down).

It's kind of the opposite actually, if you have a state lottery, there's not really any incentive to make the payout rates favorable. Whereas if you have multiple competing lottery companies then hopefully they would be forced to have reasonable payouts at the risk of having customers go to their competitors.

Of course they would have to be regulated, the mob will just do whatever they want.

>I think the idea is that if you legalize games of chance and have them run by the state, the rules are at least fair and there is some level of oversight that prevents people from being completely taken advantage of.

In California the mob "numbers racket" had a better payout (as a percentage of ticket sales) than the state lottery does.

Yeah, but the state also isn't going around breaking peoples' legs because they can't pay.

Even the mob takes lottery ticket money up front. That's not really an issue unless you're borrowing from them to play. But if you're borrowing to play you could just as easily be borrowing for the state lottery.

>The money collected by them is usually earmarked for one thing, used for that purpose for a while, and then raided for some other pet project.

I thought the common plan was to shift other sources of funding for what ever the lottery is meant for. Money is fungible so the end result is basically the same, but they technically are allowed to claim the lottery money is going to where it is supposed to. Lawmakers just never mention that for every dollar the lottery makes, they take a dollar out of the normal budget allocation and put it somewhere else.

Texas did both. They diverted the funds from lottery and cut funding for education.

[0]http://www.texaspolicy.com/blog/detail/tracking-the-distribu...

If I want to spend a few bucks on the lottery every now and then where do you or the state get off telling me I'm not allowed to do that? It's a private transaction that has nothing to do with you.

It's more than that. I don't want to overstate it, but it's also a false hope that keeps people from addressing real systematic concerns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com