Business Insider spotlights 18 ways in which lotteries prey upon America’s least favored.
Business Insider spotlights 18 ways in which lotteries prey upon America’s least favored.
This article from Salon.com outlines the ten strongest reasons why state lotteries hurt the economy and the poor. It explains how lotteries not only hurt those who play, but also hurt local business and help foster crime.
A recent rise in online gambling has caused some states to allow consumers to purchase lottery tickets online. However, as this article explains, this allows problem gamblers to rack up huge amounts of debt more quickly and more easily.
Amy Ziettlow investigates how the ubiquitous electronic gambling machine absorbs the time and money of many seniors, while exploiting their loneliness, idleness, and boredom.
One of the effects of regional casinos is the sex trafficking of minors. This atrocity is garnering more and more attention nationwide as the number of children affected increases.
Increase in sex trafficking of minors getting local, state attention
A study by the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions shows that our nation’s poorest citizen are also those who problem gambling hits the hardest. Those living in poor neighborhoods are over twice as likely to have a gambling addiction than their counterparts in a more affluent community.
People in poor neighborhoods are twice as likely to have gambling problems
Casinos fail to increase revenue even though casino leaders continue to promise to the contrary, according to an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. Instead of generating new income to provide for education and other services, experts say casinos provide an unstable and unsuccessful base for revenue and caution against using them to fix budgetary problems.
This story in The Chicago Reporter chronicles the funding problems that have plagued the city’s education system. The article proposes that instead of buying lottery tickets, that give only 30 cents per dollar to the school system, Chicago’s children would be better served with contributions directly to the schools.
Better Odds- Money for lottery tickets could be better spent on education
According to this Washington Post story, a new report reveals that slot machines are manufactured to trick players. The machines often use positive reinforcement, in the form of celebratory sounds, to convince gamblers they have won when they are actually losing their money.
As part of their costly public relations campaigns to gain approval for casinos, gambling operators and their supporters commonly promote the narrative that there is little alternative to their proposal to “add” jobs to a region. “If not this casino,” they ask, “what else is there to put local people to work?” While there are no short cuts to building real prosperity in a community, there are much better options than the path of failure offered by casinos. Here is one: Economists James Heintz and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that infrastructure investment spending in general creates about 18,000 total jobs for every $1 billion in new investment spending. This number include jobs directly created by hiring for the specific project, jobs indirectly created by supplier firms, and jobs induced when workers go out and spend their paychecks and boost their local economy. Below is their 2009 report.