Another aspect is that in many states, a large portion of the lottery goes directly into public good programs like education: https://www.powerball.net/distribution-of-revenue

All the players know that the odds are horrible, but in the end someone does win.

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Retric 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Money is fungible, every penny going from the lottery to X is a penny not taken from the general fund.

Thus specific funds for X is only meaningful as a minimum funding amount.

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Waterluvian 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And they would also have to believe that their education system in its current form would have been even worse without the lottery.

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dangus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is technically true, but the end result is that if you abolish the lottery (unpopular) you have to raise taxes (even more unpopular) to replace lost revenue.

Sin taxes work so well at plugging funding gaps specifically because they are optional.

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	▲	Retric an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That and they are taxing the poor and under educated who are least likely to complain. Making things explicit such as stamping a “45% Tax” on lottery tickets really changes people’s perception. The Trump administration almost flipped out when Amazon considered explicitly adding tariffs to people’s checkout.