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Unlike many other forms of gambling, the lottery is a government-sponsored game in which players buy tickets, choose numbers (or have machines select them for them), and win cash prizes if their chosen numbers match those drawn. It’s a popular activity that reaches far into the culture.

While the casting of lots to determine fates and fortunes has a long record, state-sponsored lotteries have only been around since the late 1960s, when they were introduced in response to states’ growing need for revenue without having to raise taxes on middle and working classes. It was a time of anti-tax anxiety and a belief that the “painless” lottery revenues would allow governments to expand services and avoid cutting them in times of economic stress.

But while state lotteries have been popular as a source of revenue, they have also generated other problems, particularly in their role as a regressive form of taxation. The majority of lottery participants are poor, and the bottom quintile spends a disproportionate share of its income on tickets. This spending obscures the regressiveness of the lottery, and leads to false perceptions that it’s a way for the poor to get out of poverty.

There is also the question of how states make policy decisions about the lottery, which are inherently political. Public policies are usually made in a piecemeal, incremental fashion and, as they evolve, the overall impact of the lottery on the population is often overlooked. This is especially true in the case of state lotteries, where authority for the games is split between the legislative and executive branches of the government and where the general public welfare is taken into account only intermittently by officials in charge of the operation.