In my home state of Pennsylvania (and I’m sure we’re not alone), our lottery “benefits older Pennsylvanians.” Growing up, I always recognized the irrationality of buying lottery tickets, but otherwise I was completely ambivalent. One may question if we should have lotteries at all, as it gives false hope to almost everyone who participates while benefiting only a tiny percentage. Moreover, research shows that winning the lottery does not have lasting positive effects at all (admittedly, however, I am very skeptical of research in this vein, but I digress). These reasons certainly form a compelling case for eliminating lotteries.
But there is another reason that I think often gets overlooked. Let’s consider the lottery in practice. The output, as the Pennsylvania lottery brags in their advertisements, benefits seniors. But from where do the inputs come? They overwhelmingly come from poor people. Thus, to oversimplify, the lottery redistributes money from the poor to seniors, who may or may not be poor. There’s two problems that I can see with this. One, from Social Security to Medicare to other services, which taxes on the lottery help fund, America takes care of its seniors. But what they don’t consider is whether some of these seniors need the help. The lottery contributes to a what in many cases is a regressive redistributive system; while the lottery does benefit many seniors, I question whether a sizable portion of that money goes to people who don’t actually need it. Second, even if the contributions went to mostly poor seniors, we’re left with one poor population funding another poor population.
A more honest slogan for the PA lottery might be “Giving false hope to the poor to benefit the old.” But that just doesn’t sound as nice.
