John Oliver: State lotteries are losers

I've never been in favor of state lotteries and other forms of government-organized gambling.  John Oliver shows how the numbers don't add up, not even for the supposed beneficiaries, our public schools.  

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: The Lottery (HBO)

November 9, 2014 | YouTube

State lotteries exploit the poor (NPR)

I've said this before but it bears repeating [emphasis mine]:

Constant re-betting cuts the payback from lotteries significantly. And the official payback rate is not that good. Massachusetts returns on average about 73 percent of every bet, the highest of any lottery. That is still dramatically worse than the 90-plus-percent payback of casino games.

Why would anyone play such bad odds? With thousands of outlets in each state — Massachusetts has 7,400 — economists say the sheer availability of lotteries gives them a decisive market edge. 

Cornell University economics and management professor David Just offers another reason why gamblers bite. "What appears to be happening is that they really believe that there's going to be a return on this investment," he says.

Just and his colleagues crunched lottery data from 39 states. He says many people, especially the less educated, simply don't understand how abysmal their chances are.

Even if everyone did understand, Just says, his research shows why some still might play.

"It's the desperation play," he says. "People don't treat it like entertainment. Instead those — particularly those who are poor — are treating this more as an investment opportunity. It's their Hail Mary pass to try and make it big."

And here's some red meat for my dear conservative friends:

"To me the astounding thing was looking at how much the prevalence of people down around the poverty rate, particularly people who were on different forms of welfare, that those really did correlate so tightly with lottery play," Just says.

Call me a conservative prude, but I think it's immoral exploitation of the poor. Moreover, the U.S. is fooling itself if it thinks it can gamble its way to economic prosperity. 

States may think they've found in gambling and lotteries the golden goose to pay for schools, roads, police, etc. but what they're really doing is taxing desperate poor citizens to pay for all these "extras" -- and indirectly getting the federal government to chip in via welfare.  Why not simply let the federal gov't. spend more on roads and schools directly, like liberals want, instead of doing these things the meandering, inefficient "free-market" way??

Meanwhile, folks like myself who don't gamble get to enjoy all the same public benefits without paying a cent. That's not fair, right?

UPDATE (08.08.2014): Here's a hypocritical selfie of me, wearing a Keno t-shirt. Hey, it was free, 100% cotton:

I'M actually fun every 3 minutes, so who needs Keno?

Lotteries Take In Billions, Often Attract The Poor

By Steve Tripoli

July 16, 2014 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/UcEDwC

The REAL 'stupidity tax' benefits Wall Street

I admit I'm one of those people who looks down on people who buy lotto tickets and gamble regularly. The house always wins, as they say. It's just not rational to throw one's money away like that. 

Chris Arnade reminds me not to be so condescending. After all, since the American Dream died, statistically speaking, in the 1980s, what is there left except the lottery?

More importantly, Arnade points out the hypocrisy of those who pooh-pooh gambling by the poor, and yet have their bets covered by the U.S. taxpayers. Yeah, I'm talking about the FIRE sector and the Too Big To Fail-Wall Street bailouts.  

Arnade was an investment banker and saw it firsthand, how greed, stupidity -- and I would say criminal fraud -- was rewarded [emphasis mine]:

A few years later Wall Street imploded. Our collective bets made with borrowed money soured, collapsing banks and collapsing the economy. The bank I worked for only stayed solvent because of a government bailout. We were allowed to keep our money and jobs. The cost of the financial collapse to the US economy however was huge, trillions of dollars huge. By one estimate it has cost the average US family between $50,000 to $120,000 (pdf).

That financial crisis hasn't changed Wall Street much. A few rules have worked their way through the system, but extensive lobbying by the financial community is watering them down. The perverse compensation structure that encourages excessive risk taking is still in place. Banks are still too large to fail.

When the next crisis happens, and by the nature of markets, it will happen again, the government will do the only rational thing it can, and once again step in and save the institutions with taxpayer money. The economy will again be wrecked and the average family will again pay the costs.

The bankers won't suffer much, not personally. That's the real stupidity tax, and we are all paying.

And finally, not to sound like a, gee whiz, class warrior, but shouldn't the default assumption be, until proven otherwise, that anybody working on Wall Street is a leech on Uncle Sam's neck?... kinda like conservatives' default assumption that anybody on welfare is a lazy moocher?

The Powerball lottery: is it really a stupidity tax?

By Chris Arnade

February 16, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3mn93

American Dream v. American Lotto

I was waiting for the part when Robert Samuelson blamed the death of the American Dream on Obama.  Whew! -- he didn't.  Instead, he explains it was Bill Clinton's fault for perverting the Dream to:  Americans “who work hard and play by the rules shouldn’t be poor.”  

We knew it had to be one of them to blame.  (Beating up on Jimmy Carter is so '70s.)  Damn you, Slick Willy!

Seriously though, outside of pundits and politicians, most Americans have gotten the memo that the Dream is dead.  Maybe they have read how income mobility is greater in Canada and Europe, although I doubt it.  All they have to do is compare how they live now to how their parents or grandparents did. The Dream is now the Lottery: keep working, paying your taxes and buying those tickets, year in-year out, and maybe, just maybe, you'll get lucky, too.  

Is it any wonder that casinos, online poker and other forms of legalized gambling are making a huge comeback?  Everybody knows the game is rigged, the house always wins, and yet, and yet.... They prefer to hope against the odds.  

Today Ben Franklin would be scratching lotto cards.

The American Dream’s empty promise

By Robert J. Samuelson

September 24, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-the-american-dreams-empty-promise/2012/09/23/e630946c-0428-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html