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Comment by grellas | Hacker News Reader

I remember when California first instituted its lottery and, upon hearing that 1/3 of the proceeds would go toward financing education (the political justification for the system), 1/3 would go toward administrative expenses, and 1/3 would go toward paying off winners, I immediately envisioned a poker game with six guys being told that a stranger would be taking away two-thirds of every pot for each hand they played and thought, "what a sucker game that is."

In his autobiography, Malcolm X spoke of the numbers-game racket that so decimated Harlem in his day. They used to call this exploitation. Now they call its modern counterpart enlightened public policy. Pretty sad.

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"I picked strawberries, and though I can't recall what I got per crate for picking, I remember that after working hard all one day, I wound up with about a dollar, which was a whole lot of money in those times. I was so hungry, I didn't know what to do. I was walking away toward town with visions of buying something good to eat, and this older white boy I knew, Richard Dixon, came up and asked me if I wanted to match nickels. He had plenty of change for my dollar. In about a half hour, he had all the change back, including my dollar, and instead of going to town to buy something, I went home with nothing, and I was bitter. But that was nothing compared to what I felt when I found out later that he had cheated. There is a way that you can catch and hold the nickel and make it come up the way you want. This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating."

The state I lived in previously recently approved and instituted a state "education" lottery, where all the proceeds would benefit the education system. The campaign was relentless for a few years until approved.

What they _didn't_ tell people was that, upon approval, most state funding would stop and be _replaced_ by the lottery proceeds.

In the end it turns out that the lottery proceeds were much less compared to the state funding and, therefore, the educational funding has been greatly reduced.

Ideally, the 1/3 that goes towards education would be spent on training the people who buy lottery tickets to understand statistics.

As the rabbit said in "Street Fight"

It's our money. Let's keep it!

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