Hacker News Reader

Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Our own government perpetuates the greatest of all frauds, the lottery, over the poor and uneducated to the tune of tens of billions a year. I’ve tried all my life to get my mother to stop buying tickets and she simply won’t despite being a complete dependent of her children (and she’s never won decades later!). It’s a sickness.

Herbalife (and Casinos) for that matter feed off that sickness as well. It’s hard to rationalize banning one and not ban the others and from my ignorant perspective, American society is not in a place where it can collectively come to a consensus to end industries that feed off of the intellectual, emotional and psychological deficiencies of people. The machine is just too big.

View on HN

At least the lottery or casinos are honest in the sense that you know you're playing a gamble. I'm not a fan either, but it that's what people want to do ... shrug

The biggest problem I have with Herbalife and similar companies is that they're dishonest and deceitful. It's not even a gamble, it's just a fraud.

It's pretty common for not poor people to buy lottery tickets. When the NY lottery was really big about 3 years ago, everyone at my old firm put in a $100 (so like 7k total) to buy tickets. Ended up winning $200, so we bought some champagne.

I noticed other firms doing the same thing, with the convenience store guy telling me that the building in total spent over 100k on lottery tickets within a week or so.

Moreover, the lottery isn't a fraud. The mechanisms and payouts are all known, much like roulette or blackjack. We have a word for it, and it's called gambling (not fraud).

I've worked at a couple of places that better than average paid folks pooled some money to buy Powerball tickets. Its low grade gambling and a little bit of team building. I do remember the big one in the late 90's we won our money back which actually was much more difficult than just losing.

I was asked to buy $120 worth of tickets in 94ish and not one damn winning number showed up on any of the tickets. It was requested I never buy for the group again.

> It was requested I never buy for the group again.

Hah! Obviously they should have sent you to buy the tickets, scoured them all for missing numbers, and then sent someone else to buy those.

I would guess that buying $120 of tickets and not matching even a single number is extremely improbable! You were the golden goose, just inverted.

If I remember right, the odds were better to win the lottery than do what I did. I did pull out a probability book at the time. Born under a bad moon I guess.

I think the people buying scratch offs every week are gambling. The people who buy a Powerball or Mega Millions a few times a year, when it gets huge, are just doing it just for entertainment’s sake and have no serious expectation of winning.

It’s still problematic, but the real argument for keeping the lottery is that without it, organized crime would start running more of their own numbers games again.

Agreed. It definitely makes sense from a harm reduction standpoint, keeping people from turning to more predatory options.

At the same time, it's pretty sickening to see the normalization of dangling a pipedream in front of people trapped in lives of 'quiet desperation.'

It's a 60% best solution, where the next best solution is 20% best.

I feel the fraud part is when states claim having a lottery will provide more money for schools and then in the following years they cut general education spending.

I even remember hearing ads on radio encouraging folks to "pay-it-forward" by buying more lottery tickets and framing gambling as charitable giving.

"For the children" indeed.

At least in the US, gross lottery revenue is only a fraction, about 1/8th the total expenditure on K-12 education.

I think John Oliver put it best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

What percentage of your combined salaries was 7k?

How many people were playing the lottery weekly?

How many people were playing the lottery with the mentality it was the only way to achieve financial freedom?

Do you really not see the difference between poor people gambling daily and well-off people joining in on it as a spectacle?

In case you need it spelled out... it's no surprise the poorest populations consistently end up putting the most into the lottery because of weaker educations, lower financial literacy, bleaker financial outlooks

https://cnsmaryland.org/gambling/lottery/lottery.html

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/wiscons...

https://southsideweekly.com/illinois-lottery-exacerbates-ine...

The story is the same all over the country. It's easy to sit back from a comfortable place on here and say "well the odds are right there, can't they see how low they are??" but it certainly doesn't show strong social awarenesses...

The worst part is the most vulnerable people aren't getting out nearly what they put in between a lack of social safety nets and the fact these groups tend to be the most underrepresented in their governments.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-21/where-cas...

> “In almost every case states either earmark the funds for education but then decrease the general fund appropriations for education by a similar amount, or, in more cases, they simply put the money in the general fund,” says Denise Runge, a dean at the University of Alaska Anchorage and editor of Resorting to Casinos: The Mississippi Gambling Industry.

In fact in some cases, these lottery are literally taking from the poor and giving to the middle and upper classes.

There's the merit-based scholarship example in the article, but even cases where funds end up being used on things like "historical preservation"... historical preservation is great, but feeding the hungry and giving the homeless places to sleep feel like much better investments in our populations. There are tons of "feel good" initiatives in a similar vein

I think what you're saying is that lottery tickets function as a regressive tax, along with cigarette and alcohol taxes. The poorest and disproportionately taxed with these kinds of products.

It's a good point, and many economists are against regressive taxation.

But people want to gamble and you're not going to change their behavior by eliminating the lottery. Before state run lotteries, numbers games were very popular and run by organized crime.

The government has much less power to change people's behavior that many assume. After all, the drug war has been a historic failure, just like prohibition before it.

You might as well make these kinds of activities legal in order to reduce violence and disempower organized crime.

People are gonna do what they want to do and ultimately, they are responsible for those (possibly poor) decisions. You can't protect people from themselves, only try and give them the tools to make decisions that maximize happiness over their life-time.

No one is saying gambling should be illegal or the government should somehow force people to stop gambling...

But there is so much that could be done to try and limit the damage it's doing to poorer populations, and increase the good it's doing for those populations at the same time.

Bans and restrictions on advertising lotteries, limiting points of sale per sq. mi., actually using the funds as claimed when instated, focusing on the types of gambling and their effect on addiction rates (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/202003/pro...), changes to the actual act of playing the lottery (even things as simple as purchasing process can have profound effects on how people get their "hit" from gambling).

Look at cigarettes, they're still legal, yet through policy America has gone from a country where the vast majority of adults smoked (almost 70%), to one where less than 15% of the population does.

Now this being HN I need to put the disclaimer that I'm not saying every piece of tobacco legislation maps perfectly to gambling if you Ctrl+F replace... but it shows how truly vast the gully between banning something and letting it proliferate is.

If there was truly interest in helping these people there are countless levers that could be used to try and balance the scale. But there's the perverse combination of financial incentive to do nothing, and political disincentive to do anything as long as politicians can get away with their treatment of these people.

But cigarettes are an extreme example of a tax on the poor, just like lotteries. From your rhetoric, I would have imagined that you would be against the aggressive taxation on cigarettes. I know I am.

I even gave the disclaimer it's own paragraph.

While I don't really care about the lottery and I'm fully aware about the odds, whenever there's a buy event in the office I always join. I consider that an insurance against my coworker winning.

You might have just described an election.

The lottery is not gambling because the probability of winning the lottery is 1/290 million making the expected payout almost zero in most circumstances; which is significantly less than black jack and orders of magnitude harder to win.

Under what other circumstances would be possibility tolerate that low level of efficacy?

Until it is a fraud: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Lotto_fraud_scandal

I agree with you on the lottery, the world would be better off without it. The problem in this case is that it's also entertainment, and people will pursue it whether it's legal or not because they want to gamble. In this case if we have to have it, I'd rather have the government run it than a for-profit company.

Herbalife (and other MLM) are just straight fraud. Pyramid schemes are illegal in most countries, but companies like Herbalife manage to squeak by. My guess would be it's because of money, but really I have no idea how they get away with it.

Herbalife actually makes (labels?) products that are decent enough, so I don’t think you can outright call it fraud.

The seller structure is definitely a pyramid scheme, but I’m not convinced that alone is reason enough for it to be illegal. It’s mindbogglingly stupid, of course. But consenting adults should be free to be as stupid as they want, provided they’re not harming anyone else or doing irreparable damage to themselves.

With all kindness meant towards your mother, does she buy a fixed number of ticket(s) every week, or does she buy as many as she can?

I think the lottery and MLM both tap into the same dreams, but a key difference is that the lotto ends at the cheap thrill, while MLM is a spiral that sucks you down forever.

The lottery is tolerated because it raises revenue without raising taxes. Here in California, ending the lotto means cutting public school funding. I would welcome higher taxes to end the lotto, but politics is politics.

Great point. What's the rationale for allowing governments to run lotteries? How can governments serve the interest of the people while running a gambling racket against the people? Isn't it shocking that governments are running lotteries rather than casinos? It would be like governments selling soda to the public rather than private companies.

> What's the rationale for allowing governments to run lotteries?

Using the profits for education, etc.

1. Raise taxes 2. Have a statewide lottery 3. Cut school funding

You get to pick #2 or #3.

* 1, 2, and/or 3

why do we never give agency to people? is your mother an automaton that simply reacts to inputs or does she have any ability to not buy lottery tickets?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com