2. The "Sin Tax" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_tax ) on lotteries, like all sin taxes (i.e. cigarettes, alcohol), is highly regressive and hostile to the poor.
That's an interesting point, though it's hard to imagine the total market cap would be anywhere near as large if lotteries weren't available in every corner store/gas station/etc.
If you had to directly seek it out as a black market activity, the outflow of capital from from the poor and working class would be diminished, but even if that were two orders of magnitude less, that's 70M/year flowing to organized crime.
Not sure how to feel about this, since it seems immoral for the government to implement a de-factor regressive tax scheme, but your point stands.
So maybe a hybrid approach would be to keep them legal and monopolized by the state but simultaneously run PSA and adverts as well as emblazon labels on the tickets about the ills they visit upon the buyers.
And so a successful lottery organization would be one which eventually drove itself out of business.
Or just take a smaller cut and spread the winnings thinner so that the expected value is closer to the actual spending. Change it so that they have to be scratched to win (instead of buying and scanning), or institute other limiting factors.
If you had to directly seek it out as a black market activity, the outflow of capital from from the poor and working class would be diminished, but even if that were two orders of magnitude less, that's 70M/year flowing to organized crime.
Not sure how to feel about this, since it seems immoral for the government to implement a de-factor regressive tax scheme, but your point stands.