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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand why the government has to be so involved in gambling. I'm pretty much okay with the lottery, it's kind of silly thing you can play with friends or coworkers, you pretty much know you're not going to win. But scratch off tickets are worse because it's kind of unlimited. Most people wouldn't blow $100 on lottery tickets, but might on scratch off. There's no delay, just buy immediately to lose. And then they have the apps. Why? Are they really necessary? And to top it off, there's advertisements. It's one thing to say people want to gamble and this is a way to take a reasonable profit and use it to pay for public services. It's quite another to actually try to encourage people to play.

Do we really have to optimize everything?

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I live in Massachusetts. I don't play the lottery. I don't know a lot of people who play the lottery. But, evidently, some people in Massachusetts spend a lot on the lottery, a shockingly large amount: over $800 per capita. Some people out there are making up for my absence from the game.

> A 2019 survey found that households with an income below $30,000 spent 13% of their income on lottery tickets, compared to just 1% for households with incomes of $50,000 or higher.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2022-12-08/...

Lottery is famously targeted at the poorer part of society.

Our social circles don’t extend far enough to see the people buying lottery tickets.

In most markets with state lotteries, it's easier to pass a lottery than a tax increase; they're typically sold as a way to fund schools or some other public good. It's an inefficient revenue capture in the sense that there are higher costs (marketing, printing lottery tix, profit for the lottery operator, etc.) but you can get it across the finish line and not have to worry about your opponent calling you out for raising taxes.

California's lottery, converted to a tax and using topline revenue numbers, would be ~$235 annually per resident.

Sincere question: what is the alternative you have in mind? Banning gambling or deregulating it?

One of the two great sins of the otherwise competent and progressive Blair/Brown New Labour government in the UK (1997-2010) was that they extensively deregulated and relaxed rules about gambling and simply taxed it.

The worst excess of this -- thankfully now finally heavily regulated -- was the Fixed Odds Betting Terminal:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/a-stup...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/27/high-s...

An excellent pair of articles by the brilliant Victoria Coren-Mitchell, but read the first one especially.

Deregulated gambling almost destroyed British society and created a new class of bankrupt addicts. And the internet and app stores are making it bad even as successive governments try to back away from the stream of revenue.

I personally think the solution is a near total ban on everything except horse and greyhound racing (for now) and state-controlled lotteries, but we are so far away from that now.

The alternative? Allow a state lottery (e.g. Mega Millions), bet rid of the scummy mobile apps. Stop advertising. And stop pushing the scratch off games, or remove them all together. Overall it would reduce some revenue but be a net positive to society.

Who says you have to deregulate anything or make it legal otherwise?

> The alternative? Allow a state lottery (e.g. Mega Millions), bet rid of the scummy mobile apps. Stop advertising. And stop pushing the scratch off games, or remove them all together. Overall it would reduce some revenue but be a net positive to society.

I fully agree with this. It completely fits my own perception of the problem. But I asked because a lot of people who think the government has no place in gambling are seeking deregulation, not what is necessary: recriminalisation.

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