Do state lotteries get income due to gambling addiction?

For a long period of time, lotteries have been a very profitable business for states, giving millions of dollars to fund various educational establishments and shelters for homeless people.

But numerous attacks on online and mobile raffles by anti-gambling legislators that appeared recently, made some of the states think about this way of raising money. This may be the result of the introduction of new technologies and games. The new limitations will deal with the way the tickets are sold and the contents of the advertising billboards.

43 states and the District of Columbia sell their own raffles, which were introduced as a way to fill in the budget. The profit that every state has from lotteries is about $1 billion and New York got even $9.2 billion in 2014, according to the information provided by the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. In total, the sum is about $70 billion, and this is 10 percent of the general states’ budget.

However, the anti-gambling legislators treat these sums as an evidence of increasing gambling problems and the worsening of other social troubles, such as poverty, homelessness and so on.

According to the analyzes held by the Stateline as to the degrees of states’ dependence on lotteries’ sales, in such states as Massachusetts, Rhode Island and South Dakota the profit was $700 per capita in 2014, in ten other states- only $100 per capita, and in the rest – $250.

The numbers of sales and other gambling concerns pushed the government to restrict tickets’ selling by credit cards and promote warnings as to addictive gambling. Minnesota’s bill by the state Rep. Chris Swedzinski demanded 25% of the billboards to be dedicated to warnings and cautions about gambling.

There are also some questions whether to allow selling lotteries online, via mobiles, at ATMs, gas pumps or video slots .

As the National Conference of State Legislatures informed, some of the states continued to expand lottery business. Terry Rich, the president of the North American Lottery association, supports this. Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed the bill banning to sell tickets online last year, but the new debates have resurfaced this year. His opponent is Republican Rep. Greg Davids, who worries that lottery will make new generation gambling addictive.

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