You don t volunteer to pay this tax anymore than you volunteer to pay the tax on bread, beer, or your wages. The government doesn't give you a choice and the only way you can avoid the tax on bread is to not buy bread or the flour used to make bread. The lottery tax is regressive. It takes a higher percentage of a poor man s wages than a rich man's. Every study has shown this to be the case and there has not been one published study that contradicts this finding.
Poor people pay the bulk of the lottery tax.
If there are any beneficiaries of the state lottery besides bureaucrats, it is the middle and upper-income classes. The program requires all students to apply for federal aid and scholarship programs, so the poor and minorities are funded not by the lottery but by our federal taxes. The highly touted Georgia lottery is just a bunch of hot political air. The big beneficiaries have been the college bureaucracies where salaries and payrolls have been pumped upwards with lottery money. Second, the economy has been growing at a rapid rate, which has pushed up ticket sales.