True, there's a population which overspends on lottery tickets. But those people would also be spending their money on other pleasures otherwise - the solution there is increased social care and responsibility for these people, rather than taking the lottery away from the many people who play it responsibly.

Also, that article may be very wrong - at least one other news article which would appear to reference the same study received an update to suggest the total is 2-3%, rather than the 9% originally stated, and I can't find the 9% referenced in the study itself, while the 2-3% does show up.

> But those people would also be spending their money on other pleasures otherwise

That's a pretty tall claim to make. Do you have any sources to back it up? Especially because if these people were putting money into savings instead with proper education it could make a significant path to getting out of poverty.

Experience with primarily being around decidedly working-class people?

If they put it into savings, their mental health would generally go down the drain, which would screw heavily with their ability to turn up for work, which would put them in even worse of a place. I've seen this happen. Note that studies show that the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be depressed - many attempt to escape from that feeling of pointlessness and having no future with alcohol, drugs, gambling, television, and so on and so forth.

The overuse of scratch cards is just one possible manifestation of an underlying problem - that these people usually don't have the support they need to get out of their situation. That they're living paycheque-to-paycheque with no end in sight, whether they were to save $20 a week or not. And it turns out giving them the support they need is rather expensive.

Also, proper education is incredibly expensive and inaccessible to many (night classes or long-distance learning need serious dedication and motivation with no guarantee of a job at the end of it - a well-known recipe for something that poor people are generally just not good at), and on top of that, many people just don't have the skills they'd need to succeed in further education.

My opinion? The actual issue is that there's little career progression or practical training available to get an employee from e.g. retail shift worker to somewhere else in the company with a near-guaranteed job at the end of it and full pay the entire time. And there's no reason for businesses to create those pathways so long as they have no responsibility to their employees.

> If they put it into savings, their mental health would generally go down the drain,

Does this not come back to education, though? Putting money away in savings, hopefully to secure a more stable future, should bring some measure of confidence/happiness.

This sort of basic financial sense does not require an expensive education. At least I don't think it does, maybe I am being naive.

I do take your last point. I think society in general sees retail and the like as stop-gap work or jobs for teens. The reality is very different and opportunities to improve become more and more limited with age and a lack of education.

> Putting money away in savings, hopefully to secure a more stable future, should bring some measure of confidence/happiness.

Only if you actually believe that saving money secures a more stable future. In practice, it really doesn't - you're still working at the same shitty job with no prospects, just with nothing to distract you from the reality of what that means, and maybe if you manage to save enough over half a year you can survive a couple of weeks between jobs. Woop.

It doesn't actually provide stability in the sense that makes people feel happy - a job in which it's unlikely you'll get fired without warning in the first place does that. Hopping jobs, hopping rented accommodation, hopping shitty transport that you can't really depend on but you need to depend on for a living... that's the stressor. Many people with professional jobs, stable housing, and health insurance, but no savings to speak of are quite happy.

You're never going to save enough to actually do anything with it within five years on a low-income job, no matter how much you cut back - doubly so if you have any debt at all - and there's studies that show that planning for the future where that future is not guaranteed is not a strength of many people on low incomes.

Sigh. I suppose this is true. I say "hopefully" even with a secure job and ability to put money away...

From the linked article:

> ... poor households, with annual take-home incomes under $13,000, on average, spend $645 a year on lottery tickets, which comes to about 9% of their yearly income..

  $ echo 13000*.09|bc
  1170.00

$645 is ~5% of 13k.

Note the word "under."

Dont forget tax!

Try:

$ echo "(93250.1)+(13000-9325)0.15"|bc

gives tax payments on 13k USD to IRS 1483.75

9% of take home pay is

$ echo "(13000-((93250.1)+(13000-9325)0.15))*0.09"|bc 1035

Then there is the additional sales tax at point of sale, which can further reduce buying power.

Yes its 135 than your projection, but that might be food for the week.

> they mention households earning 13k annually spending 645 (9% of income) on the lottery

It sounds like you're claiming that 645 is 9% of 13,000?

It could be 9% of their after-tax income, if you believed that households earning $13,000 paid 50% of it in taxes.

I don't think there's anyone out there that has played the lottery that isn't acutely aware of how poor the odds are. As some people above have mentioned, they're not buying a ticket to riches, they're buying daydreams and aspirations to let them forget about their financial situation.

They're not bringing up the lottery as their way to retirement as an actual financial plan. It's gallows humor.