Saw this article today.
One of my huge complaints with modern American state governement is the near-universal reliance on lotteries to fund some niche of state operatoins. In some states state lottery profits are used to fund (ironically) senior citizen services, in others, (ironically again) education. Legislators love this because it is reliably profitable and 'painless' since people opt into it. What they fail to remember is the increase in crime and indirect costs by bankruptcies caused by broader gambling. The biggest problem is the official state endorsement of destructive behavior. Several years ago when I lived in Nebraska, the state's most conservative and the state's most liberal senators joined forces to oppose a bill which would have created a state lottery in Nebraska, stating that whatever one might think about gambling in general, the state should never be "the house," recognizing that the lottery disporportoinately 'taxes' those who can least afford it. (Sadly, since this stand a decade ago, Nebraska has succumbed to the siren song of a state lottery.)
Highlight from the article: "In California, a study found that 40 percent of those who played the lottery were unemployed; in Maryland the poorest one-third of its population buys 60 percent of all lottery tickets; and in Michigan, people without a high school diploma spent five times more on the lottery than those with a college education. Finally, in numerous states, when the lottery was introduced, the number of adults who gambled increased 40 percent."
