The Social and Economic Impact of State Lotteries

Lotteries played an important role in the foundation of the United States but were abandoned because of abuses in the nineteenth century. Their reintroduction occurred in the second half of this century, when states turned to them as a way of generating needed revenue. This article explores the revenue-generating potential of state lotteries and concludes that they are incapable of contributing significant amounts of money to state coffers, and that they have not made inroads into illegal gambling. In the drive to increase revenues through legalized gambling, legislators may be ignoring their responsibility to address critical social issues directly through more progressive forms of revenue generation. To the extent that lotteries are utilized as a politically expedient alternative to taxation, they impede effective and constructive approaches to the amelioration of critical social problems.