The lottery sucks
On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes down the lottery.
$68 billion. That’s more than Americans spent last year on movie tickets, music, porn, the NFL, major league baseball, and video games combined.
The lottery is a defacto tax on poor people. Despicable. Horrible. But fun!
Update: More from The Atlantic, Lotteries: America’s $70 Billion Shame.
The researchers made another damning discovery: Local lottery ticket sales rise with poverty, but movie ticket sales do not. In other words, lotto games are not merely another form of cheap entertainment. They are also a prayer against poverty. This fits what the researchers call the “desperation hypothesis”: States are making their most hopeless citizens addicted to gambling to pay for government services.
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