Below is a chart that shows how your wages are taxed and hit with fees when you buy a Lottery ticket. It turns out “Lucky Joe” isn’t so lucky after all- over $10 of his original $13.82 is taken out for taxes and fees. Follow the path Lucky Joe’s wage takes when he buys a Lottery ticket and discover just how much the Lottery is taxing everyone who buys a ticket.
http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2013-The-Lottery-Wage-Drain-graphic.pdf
2013 The big swindle- In lotteries, the poor are the biggest losers
Research into gambling and casinos has been severely tainted by money from casino interests according to a new report by Goldsmiths College at the University of London. It draws on testimony from researchers who admit that they have lied, omitted data, or otherwise tampered with results of their research because it was funded by casino interests. One researcher says, “I was really scared about potentially annoying the industry and then getting my reputation trashed because I saw that happen… and it was really horrible. So I had a choice, say everything is fine. In other words, lie.” This article from The Independent details this shocking report that casts doubt on the validity of years of research.
This 3-part series, from Philly.com, examines the story of Joan Ginther, a woman from Texas who won millions off of scratch tickets over several years. Her story captured headlines worldwide when she won $10 million on a single scratch ticket in June 2010. Mathematicians estimated the odds of someone winning as much as Ginther has at 1 in 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 18 septillion. However, this series explains that with a little luck and patience, it might not be so difficult to cheat one of America’s biggest industries.
2014 Lottery’s ‘luckiest woman’ bet flabbergasting sums on scratch-offs
2014 How Lottery legend Joan Ginther likely used odds, Uncle Sam to win millions
2014 Lottery mystery yields clues to missing $7.5 million prize
The Massachusetts Lottery is, what the author of this Boston Globe article calls, “a Robin Hood in reverse”. Like most lotteries, it generates the most profit from poorer communities, filled with impoverished people who feel the only way to get out of their dead-end situation is to get lucky on the lottery. However, these poor communities receive back in aid a fraction of what they put in through revenue, while richer towns enjoy much higher levels of aid than they contribute to the system.
20% of all Massachusetts lottery revenue goes to the state’s Unrestricted General Government Aid program, which then uses its own systems to determine which communities need the most help and doles out aid accordingly. The only problem is that the system used by the program is becoming more and more out of touch, and the program is now taking aid from the poorer communities to give to more affluent, well-off cities and towns. The poorer communities often give the most in lottery revenue, as the poorer a neighborhood is, generally the higher the lottery revenue, only to receive significantly less in aid than they give in profits. Meanwhile, more affluent towns give little in lottery revenue, but receive much larger amounts of aid. This Boston Globe story explains why the lottery’s most profitable towns aren’t receiving what they put in.
This study, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows a biological breakdown of how adolescents’ brains make them more likely to be problem gamblers. This is because the brain of an adolescent places a greater value on rewards than does that of an adult, a developmental effect that causes more adventurous risk-taking in adolescents, which can lead to problem gambling. This thorough study explains the science behind why kids shouldn’t gamble.
2014 Neural representation of expected value in the adolescent brain
Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England have found that homeless people are ten times more likely to be problem gamblers than non-homeless people. While many studies have been done examining the link between homelessness and alcohol or drug usage, this is one of the first to consider how homelessness affects one’s propensity to have a gambling addiction. This article summarizes the study’s findings.
2014 New study reveals scale of problem gambling among homeless population
This study, made for the Iowa Department of Public Health, examined the relationship between college students and problem gambling. After using both qualitative and quantitative data, the study concluded that almost 70% of college students gambled in the past year, and about one in ten met at least DSM-IV criterion for potential problem or pathological gambling, a disturbing figure that presents real concerns for America’s future. Below is a copy of the study, which is detailed and informative, and sheds light on the future of American problem gambling.
2014 Pilot Study of Gambling Attitudes and Behaviors Among Iowa College Students
With the increasing pervasiveness of government-sponsored gambling, the issue of the dischargeability of gambling debt has become very significant. The attached report by two U.S. Trustees of Indiana highlights several major problems including how one research group suggests that about 10 percent of bankruptcy filings are linked to gambling losses, 20 percent or more of compulsive gamblers are forced to file bankruptcy because of their losses, and upwards of 90 percent of compulsive gamblers use their credit cards to gamble.
GAMBLING ON DISCHARGEABILITY: Casino debt collection practices