$1.5 Billion Powerball Is Fun. It’s Also a Policy Failure.
In relying on lottery revenue, state governments have put themselves in an unholy bind. A rethink is long overdue.
Fun? Yes. Prudent? Not exactly.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
You’re not going to win the lottery. To be more precise, your chances of winning Saturday’s $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot are 292,201,338 to 1. If your goal is making money — as opposed to having fun — it’s hard to make a worse bet. Yet 45 state governments would very much like you to believe otherwise.
Each year, states spend more than $600 million marketing their lotto offerings, often through award-winning ad campaigns. (Remember “A Dollar and a Dream”?) An oddity of these ads is that they need not be honest about what they’re selling. In fact, Section 1307 of Title 18 of the US Code quite specifically excludes state lotteries from truth-in-advertising laws.