The Problems of the Lottery

The lottery is a game where players pay to enter a drawing, and if their numbers match those randomly spit out by a machine, they win prizes. It has a long history in human culture and, as a form of taxation, was once popular in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin sponsored a lottery to raise money for cannons for Philadelphia during the American Revolution, and George Washington even tried his hand at it with a failed lottery to build roads across Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

The idea behind lotteries is that they are a painless way for states to raise money, while also benefiting the public through prize distribution. But the truth is that most state lotteries are rife with problems.

In order to understand this, we must first look at what actually happens when you buy a ticket. Typically, the state legislates a monopoly for itself; establishes a state agency or public corporation to run the lottery; begins with a modest number of relatively simple games; and, due to constant pressure to increase revenues, progressively expands the lottery with new games.

But the expansion of the lottery has led to a second problem: “boredom.” Revenues from the more traditional lottery games have tended to rapidly expand and then level off, prompting an effort to increase them through the introduction of new games.