Lottery is a scheme for raising money by selling chances to share in a distribution of prizes. The tickets, numbered slips or \u201clots\u201d, representing prizes or blanks, are drawn from an apparatus (usually a wheel) on a date previously announced. Lottery has been around for centuries, dating to the Chinese Han dynasty between 205 and 187 BC.<\/p>\n
Americans spend about $80 billion a year on lottery tickets. Those dollars don\u2019t go to people in the top quintile of incomes, who are more likely to have discretionary spending available to them; they mostly go to those in the bottom 20 percent, including the poorest households. It\u2019s a form of \u201cvoluntary taxation\u201d that preys on the illusory hopes of the working class and lower middle classes, critics say.<\/p>\n
State governments\u2019 decision to enact lotteries was partly motivated by their need for revenue in the immediate post-World War II period. They were a way to expand state services without imposing onerous taxes on the middle and lower classes, which would have made it difficult for them to finance the social safety nets they hoped to build.<\/p>\n
But the decision also reflects a view that gambling is inevitable and that you might as well make money off of it. This was a belief inspired by all the illegal gambling that was going on, and it led to an argument that if you\u2019re going to have a lottery you might as well make it as profitable as possible, which would attract more gamblers and raise even more money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"