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> It's like discussing guns with people who will never use them.

You mean that it also creates a toxic culture which disproportionally hurts poor people and minorities? Agreed!

> lotteries are great sources of revenue (better than state corporate income taxes? Holy cow!)

They're only so because the US has this inmensely powerful anti-tax culture and lobbies. Plus, lotteries take money from the poor, which means they're aggravating the very problems we use taxes to solve.

> they are low-health-risk (someone may need treatment for gambling addiction but it never hurts their lungs or livers)

Mental health issues are health issues. Gambling addiction is not a low health risk.

> Just don't come crying to me when the state comes for your income and property taxes to make up the difference...

They should! They should come for my income and for my property taxes, and even more so for the income and property taxes of those who are richer than me. Taking money from the poor to fund the services that poor people need is obviously counter-productive.

Face it: you or anyone else isn't gonna get poor people to stop playing the lottery any more than corporations are gonna stop getting cozy tax breaks, or getting people who make decent money to campaign for it to be taxed more.

So the question I ask is: what is an acceptable compromise? Without a lottery, how much tax revenue are you going to need to make up the difference? How high can taxes be raised before people and corporations decide to move to the next state over, or even leave the country?

Taxes, lotteries, vices, addictions, weapons, they'll always be a part of our society and we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking things we don't like can simply be deleted. So, where do you draw the lines, and where do you compromise?

"you could be sitting alone in a dark room with nothing but a lottery ticket in your hand and be perfectly satisfied with fantasies of winning"

This is one of the biggest reasons I dislike the lottery, from a societal perspective: it satisfies people who would otherwise have an incentive to go out and create their own success. You can see this anytime the jackpots get big enough that non-players buy tickets. There is a noticeable drop in productivity as people sit back and fantasize about winning $1 billion or more. Instead of actually doing something that would improve their lives, they're happy sitting in the dark and fantasizing. If that's a one-day a year occurrence, fine. But its clearly not a one-day occurrence to the regular players, and I think it negatively impacts their lives far beyond the actual cost of the tickets.

You act as though everyone has the opportunity "to go out and create their own success," which is less and less true the poorer you are.

Let's assume you're right, and that many poor people have no opportunity to better their situation. That doesn't change the fact that some people absolutely do have the opportunity to better their situation, but choose not to because their desire for a better future is satisfied by the fantasy of winning the lottery. The lottery acts as a drain in these cases, not only on the individuals who continue to stagnate, but to the rest of us who would benefit from those individuals contributions.

I'll also note that I fundamentally disagree with your statement. Everyone has an opportunity to create their own success. Obviously not everyone has the same kinds of opportunities or the same number of opportunities. Those of us with enough time to comment on Hacker News probably have dozens of opportunities PER DAY to create our own success, whereas a poor black kid from Baltimore may only have one, and it may require him to wake up at 4am to go to work or stay up till midnight to educate himself. But those opportunities still exist, even if you're poor.

>This is one of the biggest reasons I dislike the lottery, from a societal perspective: it satisfies people who would otherwise have an incentive to go out and create their own success.

They could do that, but would they? They might just spend the money on beer or drugs.

Speaking of drugs, and registry, one big problem would be its an extremely expensive small time form of money laundering.

The way to destroy money laundering would be to eliminate small returns of $2 on a $1 ticket (at maybe 5% odds).

The lottery is a very expensive way to get clean traceable money, but often enough not much clean traceable money is required.

I used to think it'd be weird for criminals to use gambling to launder money - it'd be too expensive. But then I heard about FOB machines.

The UK has something called "fixed odds betting machines". These are sometimes used to launder money.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mach...

> Earlier this month the Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, fined Coral bookmakers £90,000 in profits it made from one drug dealer who had laundered almost £1m in its shops. Last month the industry regulator also publicly admitted what has long been privately acknowledged: FOBTs present a "high inherent money-laundering risk".

The machines take £200 at a time. This would have been mostly in £10 and £20 notes. It's not clear from the article if the launderer put the whole £1m through the machines, or "just" £90k.

> Dealers feed their drug money through the machines, losing a little and then cashing out with the vast majority of their stake, James says. They can then collect a printed ticket showing they have gambled that day – meaning that if stopped by police, they can answer questions about why an apparently unemployed young man carries hundreds of pounds in rolled-up cash.

Either way, it's a lot of cash.