Lottery Ad Ignores Math

Arkansas Lottery

Recently ads for PowerBall have appeared around Arkansas, saying, “Someone’s Gonna Win, Why Not You?” But there’s a problem with the ad: There’s no guarantee “someone’s gonna win” a prize playing PoweBall.

Mathematically, the odds of winning the PowerBall jackpot are approximately 1 in 292.2 million. The odds of winning some sort of prize–such as a $4 payout–are roughly 1 in 25.

That means if 25 people each bought a PowerBall ticket, statistically speaking, one of them likely would win some sort of prize. However, there is no guarantee anyone will win; with a lottery like PowerBall, all 25 players could pick the very same losing numbers.

That’s because PowerBall’s winning numbers are all chosen at random. PowerBall isn’t like a raffle, where winning tickets are drawn from a hat based on the tickets sold. Raffles guarantee a winner; lotteries do not. That’s why PowerBall jackpots can grow to the levels we saw earlier this year: When people don’t win prizes playing PowerBall, the prize money has time to grow. While unlikely, it’s mathematically possible no one will ever win at PowerBall again.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” With the lottery, the facts cannot be ignored: There simply is no guarantee that “someone’s gonna win.”

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Lottery Pays Less Than 24% to Scholarships Despite Skyrocketing Ticket Sales

Arkansas Lottery

According to financial reports published by the Arkansas Lottery this week, the Lottery took in $58.7 million last month, but paid out $13.8 million for college scholarships–less than 24% of its gross revenue for the month.

Below is a breakdown of the numbers since Fiscal Year 2016 started at the Arkansas Lottery last July.

Month Gross Lottery Revenue Paid to Scholarships % Gross Revenue
July $31,665,651.14 $5,784,683.09 18.3%
August 31,265,177.55 5,490,094.00 17.6%
September 36,134,389.63 6,624,967.11 18.3%
October 35,261,533.80 6,020,642.32 17.1%
November 32,226,599.28 5,725,139.09 17.8%
December 38,670,746.09 6,425,754.66 16.6%
January, 2016 58,746,249.00 13,831,359.75 23.5%
Total $263,970,346.49 $49,902,640.02 18.9%

All told, seven months into Fiscal Year 2016, the Arkansas Lottery has spent only about 19% of its gross revenue on college scholarships.

While Lottery officials may tout the high number of PowerBall tickets sold last month due to the record jackpots, the fact remains the Arkansas Lottery continues to allocate a pitiful percentage of its gross revenue for college scholarships. The average state lottery allocates around 30%. In Louisiana, 35% of lottery revenue goes to education. In Arkansas it is much, much less.

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Powerball, Gambling, and Moral Failures

Arkansas Lottery,

John Stonestreet and our friends at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview released an excellent commentary today highlighting the “moral deficit” involved when it comes to Powerball and state lotteries in general.

With Powerball fever sweeping the nation, Stonestreet writes,

“Now, if all that was happening was a bunch of people throwing away a couple of bucks on astronomically-long odds, it wouldn’t warrant comment. But that’s not the only thing going on here. As ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser recently said on his radio show, it’s clear that ‘the lure of easy money affects the segment of the population you wish it [that] it didn’t affect.’

“He’s referring to the disproportionate impact of state-sponsored lotteries on those who can least afford to play them: the lower-middle class and the working poor.”

Stonestreet goes on to cite statistics from John Ballor and others showing that Americans in the lower income brackets spend the most–both in terms of number of dollars and percentage of income–on lottery tickets.

Stonestreet refers to this phenomenon as a moral deficit, saying that society is essentially passing the cost of government programs along to the poor through our state lotteries.

As John Ballor wrote recently,

“All of this is taking place in a system of legalized gambling that is monopolized and promoted by those in political power. Where state governments are supposed to be looking after the welfare of their citizenry, the commonwealth of all the people, the establishment of a lottery has in fact betrayed the citizenry.

“What begins as a well-intentioned plan to provide for the needs of the people — education funding for example — very often becomes just another source of revenue for a voracious state treasury. Lotto revenue is often diverted for new purposes through legislative and bureaucratic chicanery.”

The negative effect gambling has on the poor is one reason Christians ought to oppose gambling–but it is not the only reason. Pastor John Piper recently offered seven reasons not to play the lottery, including:

  1. The lure of easy money has spiritual consequences.
  2. Gambling is poor stewardship of our resources.
  3. Gambling, ultimately, is a “fool’s errand.”
  4. It preys on the poor.
  5. The system requires most people to lose money.
  6. There are better ways to make and manage money.
  7. State-sanctioned gambling undermines virtue.

Of course, we have written repeatedly about the poor management and negative effects of the Arkansas Lottery. We have even analyzed, roughly, how much money we believe the average lottery player in Arkansas might be spending on lottery tickets each year. As we have said all along, when it comes to gambling, the harm outweighs the benefit, plain and simple.

You can read more about Piper’s seven points here.

You can read John Ballor’s column here.

You can read John Stonestreet’s commentary here–or listen to it below.

[audio:http://www.breakpoint.org/images/content/breakpoint/audio/2016/011316_BP.mp3|titles=Powerball and the Moral Deficit]

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