One of my statistics professors told me that the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.
The Gambling Impact and Behavior Study asked 1,650 people the following: "In the past year, think about how often you bought a big jackpot lottery ticket such as Lotto or Powerball, a daily lottery ticket like pick-4, or an instant or scratch-off ticket." The graph displays answers by race. Twenty-one percent of blacks buy some kind of ticket about daily compared to only 4% of whites. A huge difference, no doubt.