When the Powerball gets big enough, the conversations at work are consumed with wishful thinkers. Feelings of euphoria fill the community daily as people are being trained to focus more on luck with scratch-offs and other lottery games, and less on the skills that God has put inside of them to be successful.
However, when you look at the stats you can see why journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce called the lottery “a tax on people who are bad at math.” Check these stats.
- Low-income households spend a higher percentage of their income chasing the lottery dream. The average household spends $162 on lotteries on average. For low-income households, the figure is $289 per year. For those who make less than $10,000 per year the figure is an astounding $597! That’s almost 6 percent of their yearly income chasing a dream.
- Poorer zip codes play the lotto more frequently AND the largest marketing budgets for lottery games are spent to market towards those in low-income neighborhoods.
- 21 percent of adults in America believe participating in a lottery is their MOST PRACTICAL way to accumulate $200,000 in net worth. Among low-income participants, 38 percent believed the same!
- The average $1 spent gets you $0.55 in return. I don’t know where it’s a good investment to spend $1 and get back $0.45 less than what you spent.
- Blacks spend FIVE times more on lotto tickets than whites.
You will notice that in many stores in Black communities they sell lotto tickets AND have a check-cashing services. They are bundling poverty services. The third thing destroying the black community is the lottery.
