Lottery
Lottery is a form of gambling in which numbered tickets are sold and prizes are awarded to winners at random. Some states have legalized it, and it has also been used for other purposes, such as determining who gets a green card or a room assignment. Life itself seems to be a lottery at times; some people are born with good luck and others with bad.
State lottery programs generally follow similar trajectories: The state legislates a monopoly; establishes an independent lottery commission or public corporation to run the program (as opposed to licensing a private firm in exchange for a share of profits); begins operations with a modest number of relatively simple games; and then, under constant pressure to generate additional revenues, progressively expands both the types of games offered and the advertising effort. This dynamic is driven by the fact that, in an antitax era, state governments have become dependent on “painless” lottery revenues; voters want their state to spend more; and politicians look at the lottery as a source of government revenue that requires little political effort to secure.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that the popularity of lotteries does not appear to have any relation to a state’s actual financial health. Lottery revenues have been used to fund all sorts of projects, including paving streets and building schools. In the end, though, most of these projects have been paid for by general tax revenues, and lotteries continue to attract widespread popular support even when state governments are in reasonably good fiscal condition.