Did anyone hear about the Big Game lottery jackpot ballooning to more than $325 million last week? It was the only thing in the news not involving the Middle East or the scandal within the Catholic Church. So I will now set my sights on lottery programs, which I consider to be nothing less than a government tax on stupidity.
Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan and Virginia all participate in the Big Game. The pot reached such monumental proportions after 18 straight drawings without a winner. Before the April 16 drawing, which finally yielded three winning tickets, poor delusional saps from each state, and in many cases surrounding states as well, lined up outside convenience stores and newsstands for a chance to beat the odds. And what odds they are. A player has a one-in-76-million chance of winning the Big Game. To put this in perspective, a person’s chances of being killed by fireworks are one-in-21.8-million. And fireworks are only legal in 34 of the 50 states!

The odds didn’t discourage many, though. Georgia was selling some 1.5 million tickets per hour April 16, contributing vast amounts of money to that state’s government. Georgia, and the other Big Game states, each pull in around $2 billion per year from lottery ticket sales, and 10 percent of that comes from the Big Game. Government lotteries are big business.
Oregon doesn’t participate in the Big Game (although other states, including Washington, will join soon), but it does make a pretty penny off its own lottery. Sales for 2001 reached $785.6 million. That’s a far cry from the billions other states rake in, but considering Oregon’s population stands at a paltry 3.42 million people, it is a hefty sum. According to these numbers, Oregonians spent about $229.71 per person on lottery tickets last year alone.
Now I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even spend $1 on lottery tickets last year, let alone $230. What’s more, I don’t know a single person who spends even close to that much. I don’t think I know anyone who even plays the lottery. So who’s spending so much money on a game with virtually no chance
of winning?
A 1999 New York Times analysis of the New Jersey lottery found that modest wage earners, the poor and the less educated spend a greater percentage of their income on the lottery than wealthier individuals, that people in the lowest-income zip codes spend five times more on tickets than people in the highest, and that there are twice as many lottery vendors in poor areas.
So it stands to reason that the people spending that $230 a year (probably more — people like me, who don’t play, drag down the average) on the Oregon lottery are the people who can’t afford it, and that the people spending that amount often don’t have the mental capacity to realize the impossibility of ever turning a profit with their gambling. Is it really fair, then, for the government to be selling them false hope at $1 to $5 a shot? I certainly don’t think so.
By the way, as of press time, only one of last week’s Big Game winners has claimed the money, a 20-year-old Georgia phone company worker. She had never bought a ticket before.