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They did this so that the lottery overall was less of a regressive tax on the poor. It's not a rip-off at all, it's actually much fairer. We desperately need something similar with our tax code as a whole.

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That may be the result, but that is not why they did it. If you read the article, they did it because sales were down and altering the odds so as to end up with some crazy high jackpot was a known way to get sales back up.

What do you mean?

My guess is that as the pot increases people of a higher income get interested. I can see an argument that if the pot increases from $1M to $10M in likelihood of someone that makes $100k/y buys a ticket will increase by more than 10 times while someone that makes $10k/y wont. Part of it is the hype and part the impact to your life being large enough to override reason.

It would be interesting to see if there are any studies that show that trend and where it cuts off.

I think the GP means that odds of getting a small win -- i.e. $4 -- went up and odds of winning big went down. So you are more likely to get your money back in small wins. Since poor people play more, they are disproportionately likely to benefit from the increase in small wins, thereby defraying their costs a bit.

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