[gz5]

and the US govt often helps facilitate gambling during downturns so we could see even more direct and indirect promotion of the problem. examples:

+ in stagflation of 70s/early 80s - states create state-run lotteries to help fix their budgets

+ 2008 great recession - states legalize casinos to recover lost tax revenue and prevent folks from traveling out of state to gamble

+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

[kotaKat]

"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...

[bityard]

I'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree.

The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.

[gruez]

>+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.