The Lottery: How it happened, and what it pays for

The lottery generates over $70 billion in revenue each year. Today on Civics 101 we explore how we got here; from failed lotteries in the Revolutionary War to the Golden Octopus to the Numbers Game to a Mega Millions ticket from your neighborhood shop. Where does all of that money GO? And why are states so dependent on them in the first place? Taking us on this madcap journey are two experts on the lottery in the US; Kevin Flynn (author of American Sweepstakes) and Matthew Vaz (author of Running the Numbers). CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

  Hello everyone. So this week, we have watched something happen that seems to be happening more and more often. Powerball, the immensely popular 45-state lottery game, which racks up huge jackpots, has done it again. As of yesterday, the Powerball jackpot was creeping up to $1 billion with a B. And I bring this up because the lottery, believe it or not, has a lot to do with civics and government in the states where it's legal to play. So here is our episode on what the lottery is, its history, how it became a uniquely American

• 0:41Nick Capodice?

  institution, and most importantly, where that money goes. All right, here we go.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  There's always been a lottery. Do we agree with old man Warner that the lottery should be continued simply because there's always been one?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  As Oklahomans try to strike it rich, they also invest in Oklahoma's future.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Or do we object with Tessie that the whole thing just isn't fair, isn't right?

• 1:09Speaker 03

  And so people who buy tickets thinking, hey, I'm helping education, do you think they're really doing as much as they think they are?

• 1:15Speaker 04

  They believe they are, but they're absolutely not benefiting education.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Whatever else Shirley Jackson has done in her story, she has certainly given us a memorable image.

• 1:26Hannah McCarthy?

  We're not talking about that lottery, are we Nick?

• 1:29Nick Capodice?

  Well, as every English teacher in America knows Hannah, the morning of June 27th was clear and sunny with the fresh warmth of a full summer day.

• 1:38Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, I'm gonna put the kibosh on Shirley Jackson from the outset, although I will say, that short story is all about hyper-local government. But I do want to ask you with all seriousness, what does buying a ticket and maybe winning millions of dollars have to do with US governmental systems? Why are we doing a civics episode on the lottery?

• 1:58Nick Capodice?

  Uh, because, uh, I'm an awesome-

• 2:01Speaker 06

  Guy. No, that isn't the right answer.

• 2:04Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, is that Kevin?

• 2:05Nick Capodice?

  It is. It is. I'll let him introduce himself here.

• 2:07Speaker 06

  My name's Kevin Flynn. I'm a former journalist and author, and I wrote the book, American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher In the Lottery Age.

• 2:20Nick Capodice?

  So we've got to do a whole mess of full disclosure here. Kevin Flynn is indeed a writer, podcast host, TV and radio journalist.

• 2:29Hannah McCarthy?

  And a dear friend.

• 2:31Nick Capodice?

  And.

• 2:31Hannah McCarthy?

  And he's married to our executive producer Rebecca LaVoy.

• 2:34Nick Capodice?

  He sure is. But we were in a Civics 101 production meeting talking about the lottery and its intersection with the government. And we learned that Kevin had written a book on it. So we had to have him on the show.

• 2:45Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, now we got that out of the way. Did he give a reason on why civics listeners should be interested in the lottery?

• 2:52Speaker 06

  It's a great question. The lottery is just a big part of state government these days.

• 2:58Hannah McCarthy?

  How big?

• 2:59Speaker 06

  Big, big. Real big.

• 3:03Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 3:05Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 3:06Nick Capodice?

  And today we are talking about the US lottery. How it started, ended, started again, how much money it makes, and where that money goes.

• 3:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Now Kevin said lottery is a big part of state government. But does every state in the US have one?

• 3:22Nick Capodice?

  Almost, almost. Mississippi was the most recent state to adopt a lottery. They started selling tickets in 2020.

• 3:28Hannah McCarthy?

  What?

• 3:28Speaker 07

  The lottery offered up scratch off tickets for the very first time. And Mississippians can take a shot at winning without having to leave the state.

• 3:35Nick Capodice?

  Five states do not have a lottery. Alaska, Hawaii, Utah, Alabama, and Nevada.

• 3:42Hannah McCarthy?

  So when did this all start? Like, when was the first lottery?

• 3:47Speaker 06

  Oh, we have always had lotteries in civilization, right? Lotteries go back to the Bible, right? In the Old Testament, it was, you know, casting lots was the way that a lot of times the will of God was divined. King Saul was selected because of a drawing of lots. Do you remember when the apostles were down a man? Where they were down to 11 guys for some reason?

• 4:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Down a man? As in after Judas Iscariot died?

• 4:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:29Nick Capodice?

  There were two candidates to become the new 12th Apostle, and they cast lots. That means they threw sticks of different lengths on the ground to see who it would be, and it ended up being Matthias. And okay, that's more Bible than Civics 101 has ever had, and maybe it's just so I could use clips from Jesus Christ Superstar.

• 4:46Nick Capodice?

  But let's move on.

• 4:47Speaker 06

  The Great Wall of China was financed, some repairs to that were financed by the Chinese for an early version of Kino. I think they called it the White Pigeon Game.

• 4:58Nick Capodice?

  The roads to Rome, Hannah, were paid for by raffles. And to finally wend our way towards America, the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, was financed with a lottery.

• 5:12Hannah McCarthy?

  You're kidding me.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  So you could say America really is, you know, the child of a lottery. Part of the Continental Army was financed through a lottery. George Washington wanted to raise $10 million to pay for the Revolutionary War, and the Continental Army through a lottery. So, you know, it was always, it's something that's been around, you know, since people had money.

• 5:39Nick Capodice?

  I want to add, by the way, that lottery in 1776 to help pay for the Revolutionary War failed utterly. They didn't come even close to raising enough money. Congress printed 100,000 tickets, but they only sold around 30,000. So to pay for the war, they just printed a bunch of money instead and borrowed a lot from France. But what's important is that it set a precedent for other lotteries in our new country to help pay for infrastructure, like roads and bridges.

• 6:08Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, now this is where it starts to become a civics conversation, right? Armies, roads, and general infrastructure costs usually fall into the purview of government expenses.

• 6:21Hannah McCarthy?

  So why is a lottery involved at all?

• 6:23Nick Capodice?

  A lottery is a way to get money for something when you don't have the power or the political interest to tax people. If you want to build a covered bridge and you don't have the money in your state budget to do it, having a lottery to build that bridge where the winner gets some of the money from the lottery tickets and the rest goes to building the bridge, that might get you reelected. Whereas raising taxes might not. So from our nation's founding up to the 1840s, over the whole United States, hundreds and hundreds of lotteries were springing up to pay for stuff. And when you have a lot of lotteries, you start to also get a lot of rigging of lotteries to pick winners.

• 7:05Speaker 06

  So it's just, you know, when you deal with a lot of cash like that, you know, sharpies are going to come in and do what they do. That's a lot of sugar, Nick. There's a lot of sugar there. It's funny because, you know, let's go to like to the mid 1800s. Lotteries ended up getting kind of a stink on them in, uh, in public. Not illegal, but in a nation where cockfighting and duels, uh, and poker games are considered gentlemanly, it was lotteries that, you know, started to get a bad name, in part because no, no poor person ever died in a duel. Right? That was, that was, the lotteries ended up democratizing gambling.

• 7:49Hannah McCarthy?

  So rich folks are gambling left and right, but the one form of gambling that working class Americans can participate in gets a bit of stigma.

• 7:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:01Nick Capodice?

  And as often the case in these instances, somebody just went a little too far. The biggest lottery in America in the 19th century was called the Louisiana Lottery Company, and it was huge. It was nicknamed the Golden Octopus. Its hands were everywhere. People all over the country played it. Over half of the mail in New Orleans was lottery tickets. And what the company did is they paid 40 grand each year to a charity hospital, and they got to keep the rest of their profits tax-free. There was a staggering amount of corruption. Bribes got paid to reps in state and federal legislatures all over the country. So in response, the federal government passed a bill banning the sale of lottery tickets in the mail.

• 8:44Nick Capodice?

  So the Louisiana Lottery Company moved to Honduras. And finally, in 1895, all lotteries in the United States were banned. And that's it.

• 8:53Hannah McCarthy?

  This is making me think of prohibition, okay? Right? You've got something that's legal, highly profitable, very popular, very prevalent, and then it's made illegal. And I would say, not just with booze, but with a lot of things in history, what history has shown us is that when you then make it illegal, it rarely if ever actually goes away.

• 9:17Nick Capodice?

  Naturally.

• 9:18Hannah McCarthy?

  And I know that the lottery didn't go away because I grew up in Massachusetts, and I know that I can walk outside and I can buy a ticket. So how did we get from the banning of the golden octopus to lotteries being run in most states?

• 9:33Nick Capodice?

  We get there via something called "the numbers."

• 9:36Speaker 07

  Okay. You know, "once upon a time," that's not a good way to start, right?

• 9:45Nick Capodice?

  I counter that "once upon a time" is always a good way to start. And this is Matthew Vaz. He's a professor at City College of New York, and he wrote a fascinating book called Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling. So, once upon a time, there was a popular, illegal game called policy.

• 10:05Speaker 07

  And it involved betting on several two-digit numbers between 1 and 72. The odds were a little complicated, but it offered a way to make a small bet on a number guess and come out with a decent amount of money if you win. You could bet a dollar, and maybe in some situations you could win $200. But the winning numbers were generated by the spinning of a wheel, so to speak, maybe sort of drawn, almost like pulling a ping pong ball out of a barrel kind of a thing.

• 10:37Nick Capodice?

  But the problem with policy was that, like all lotteries beforehand, they could be rigged. The person picking out the ping pong ball could cheat and grab one with their friend's number on it. And they did. But a new system was born in Harlem in the 1920s.

• 10:55Speaker 07

  Most people believe that it was a man named Casper Holstein, was an immigrant to New York from the West Indies, developed a new method for arriving at winning numbers. He came up with a game that is typically called the numbers that involves placing a bet or, you know, on a guess of what the last three digits before the decimal point will be in a massive number generated by some far-off uncontrollable institution. And so what they initially used was, was an institution called the New York Clearing House, right? It's a, it's a financial institution that sort of, you know, clears money from different banks and millions of dollars would pass through it every day.

• 11:37Nick Capodice?

  And at the end of the day, they'd publish how much money went through that clearing house and the last three digits of that number were the winning numbers.

• 11:44Speaker 07

  So it could say, you know, today, 12,483,221 dollars and 69 cents passed through here. And the last three digits before the decimal point were 221, right? And that's a number that no man on the street can manipulate or control. It's, it is in essence, almost a random number, right?

• 12:02Nick Capodice?

  You'd make your bet with a numbers runner, and this is important. You would pick what your numbers were. People chose lucky birthdays, favorite numbers, holidays, whatever. The odds are one in a thousand that you'll win. And the payout was usually 600 bucks for a dollar bet.

• 12:18Speaker 07

  And it becomes a very, very popular form of gambling. First, in the black communities of New York, it displaces that older policy game. People basically abandoned playing that because this game is simpler, the payouts are better, and it in effect cannot be rigged, right? It cannot be manipulated. And it becomes popular in most of the major cities, along the East Coast, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore. And eventually it spreads well beyond, you know, the black communities of those cities and becomes popular among working class whites. Organized crime figures start to muscle in on the game, particularly after prohibition is over and there's a kind of, you know, violent contestation over who's going to control the game? Is it going to be the mafia?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Or is it going to be black gamblers that had set up this game initially?

• 13:03Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, this I remember from our episode on Map the Ohio, right? That somebody bombed Don King's home in Cleveland, Ohio, over a fight to control the numbers racket. But I also remember, and we talked about this when we were making that episode, that the numbers were a community institution.

• 13:20Nick Capodice?

  Right, right. The people who ran the numbers, they lived there in those neighborhoods, in that community. And the payout, it wasn't a million dollars. And it wasn't two dollars. It was $600. And the reason I bring that up is Matthew asked me if I'd ever won two bucks on a scratch ticket, which I have.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  If you win that $4 or that $2 prize, you know, what are you gonna do with it?

• 13:44Nick Capodice?

  What are you gonna do with it?

• 13:46Hannah McCarthy?

  Probably buy more scratch tickets.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  You're gonna buy two more. Exactly, right? It's like, oh, nice, I won. Give me two more of those, right? But if you're playing the old fashioned numbers game and you win $600, what are you gonna do with that, right? Something, you know, something better. You something, you're gonna catch up on your bills or whatever it is, you know? It's gonna move you along a little bit.

• 14:12Hannah McCarthy?

  I imagine that state legislatures, which had this history of using gambling to fund projects, were taking a good hard look at the numbers games and asking, how can we get some of that?

• 14:23Nick Capodice?

  How can we get some of the, as Kevin would say, how can we get some of that sugar? Which they certainly did. But it wasn't gonna be an easy road to that pot of municipal gold. We'll get to the legalization of lottery and where the money goes right after the break.

• 14:40Nick Capodice?

  Have any of you out there ever Googled your own name, like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing, there are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just Keeps circulating. That is where incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up.

• 15:22Nick Capodice?

  You set it up once and they keep working in the background. You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 15:47Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one stop shop platform for making a professional looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

• 16:31Nick Capodice?

  So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 16:52Hannah McCarthy?

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• 17:37Hannah McCarthy?

  Find the fall pieces you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's a great way to support the show. We're back and you're listening to Civics 101. Now, just a quick reminder that our show depends on the generosity of our listeners to keep running. And instead of us having a lottery, we just ask that you donate whatever you feel is fair at civics101podcast.org.

• 18:20Hannah McCarthy?

  The odds are not the same that you will win a Mega Million jackpot, but they're almost the same. And speaking of a Mega Million jackpot, Nick, how did we get from a federally banned activity to a pastime in which millions of Americans participate?

• 18:39Nick Capodice?

  The shift to a legal Lotto starts in 1963 in a state famously opposed to taxes, none other than the home state of Civics 101, New Hampshire. Here's Kevin Flynn again.

• 18:53Speaker 06

  Well, in New Hampshire, there was a, there was a state representative named Larry Pickett who thought that a great way to raise money for state causes was, would be to hold the sweepstakes. And it was finally signed into law by Governor John King.

• 19:12Speaker 06

  And this immediately set off a whole bunch of reaction in the state and across the country.

• 19:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The lottery was illegal federally.

• 19:22Nick Capodice?

  Yes, it was.

• 19:22Hannah McCarthy?

  So is this kind of akin to states across the country decriminalizing marijuana even though at the federal level, it's still a Schedule I drug and totally illegal?

• 19:31Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, that analogy to marijuana legalization is more apt than you can possibly imagine. Because, and I'm gonna try to make this quick, you and I can't really understand just how scandalous it was for a state to legalize the lottery in the US. The FBI was involved. It was considered a national moral outrage. And to jump to the present, the path towards marijuana legalization, from the blatant racial disparity of who got arrested for it, to the national outcry against it, and states discovering how much money can be made from it, taxing it, to it becoming legal in many states to purchase, but in some of them, you've got to pay for it in cash. Every bit of it is note for note out of the lottery legalization playbook.

• 20:16Nick Capodice?

  But back to New Hampshire in the 1960s. One way they got around it is that it wasn't a lottery, per se, even though we're gonna call it one. It was technically a sweepstakes. The race is incidental to the sweep's excitement that has raised $2.5 million for New Hampshire's educational system. So instead of drawing a number on a ping pong ball and winning some money, a sweepstakes ticket holder was paired to one of 232 racehorses. And if that horse was picked to run in a race, and then that horse won that race, you won a bunch of cash. And people across the country freaked out.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  Well, the lottery ended up being a big scandal, and almost every newspaper in the state was against it. They had like some really great quotes. And this is where I hope the folks from Civics 101 get a montage together of people reading these headlines like old timey newspaper people. Like, now'd be a good time to start playing that music, Nick. I'm just, I'm just like setting you up to spike this ball, okay? Is either New Hampshire or Uncle Sam so hard up that this shabby Dodge is the only way out? What's happening in New Hampshire?

• 21:29Nick Capodice?

  The hands of politicians shouldn't happen to a dog. Scandalous experiments, more bankruptcy. There was one quote that was in favor of the lottery in New Hampshire. It's by the newspaper publisher, Bill Loeb, who said, quote, "No one has to go to the track and bet, no one has to smoke tobacco, no one has to drink. But how do those who oppose the sweepstakes propose to raise the money? Either a sales tax or property tax or some other kind of levy that people will have to pay." And New Hampshire did it. They sold lottery tickets. And people from all over the country came to New Hampshire to buy them.

• 22:07Hannah McCarthy?

  That's how much the country wanted a lottery.

• 22:09Nick Capodice?

  But the thing was, it was against the law to take lottery tickets across state lines, back to where they lived. So New Hampshire found a workaround.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  So what New Hampshire did in order to sort of get around the Gambling Paraphernalia Act was that the tickets would stay in New Hampshire. People would get a carbon copy, like a receipt. They called it an acknowledgement. So it would prove to somebody that, yes, they had purchased a ticket and you couldn't put somebody else's name, you couldn't resell the ticket. But the actual ticket, the one that would be drawn, would stay in New Hampshire.

• 22:45Nick Capodice?

  And this actually ended up in the United States Supreme Court in a case called US v. Fabrizio.

• 22:51Speaker 07

  Anthony L. Fabrizio, the athlete, knowingly carried in interstate commerce from Keene, New Hampshire to Elmira, New York, 75 acknowledgements of purchase on a sweepstakes race of the state of New Hampshire.

• 23:05Nick Capodice?

  And he lost that Supreme Court appeal.

• 23:08Speaker 06

  I found out later on that it was common knowledge that there was at least one US Supreme Court Justice who had purchased a sweepstakes ticket at the time that they heard the case.

• 23:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Seriously?

• 23:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:22Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you know which one?

• 23:23Nick Capodice?

  I can't say, Hannah.

• 23:24Speaker 06

  I can't tell you which one. I can't tell you which one, but you'll know him when you see him. If you're picking up what I'm putting down.

• 23:33Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so once New Hampshire has the ball rolling, what is the next state to follow suit?

• 23:37Nick Capodice?

  The New Hampshire sweepstakes was a bit of a strange one-off. The Empire State came next. Here's Matthew Vaz again.

• 23:43Speaker 07

  But in New York, which is the second lottery and becomes much more of a kind of national template, right, because when New York does something, the rest of the country pays close attention.

• 23:54Speaker 07

  That debate in New York, which happens over the course of 1965 and 66, is much more centered around the problem of illegal gambling.

• 24:02Nick Capodice?

  New York legalizes the lottery in 1966, and then a bunch of other states do the same. But they can't compete with these illegal numbers games that we talked about earlier. And one of the reasons is, is that unlike the numbers game, in the lottery, you couldn't pick your own numbers. That was it. You couldn't pick birthdays, or holidays, or your kid's age.

• 24:28Hannah McCarthy?

  We're such a superstitious bunch.

• 24:30Speaker 07

  Essentially, these state lotteries don't rest until they figure out how to get to that numbers clientele. And it takes them a number of years. It's New Jersey that first figures out the technology, right, like, how do we set up something that will allow people, a network that allows people to guess the number rather than just receive the number. And that first New Jersey game was called Picket. Until then, this is Dick LaRosa saying thanks for watching and playing Picket and Pick Four with us. Good night.

• 25:00Nick Capodice?

  And Matthew told me the lottery was a pretty sleepy thing for 13 years, until they indeed did figure out a way to let people pick numbers, after which sales quadrupled in four years. And here we are.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Across the United States, tens of millions of people are clinging to a little piece of paper and a lot of hope. That's because tonight, someone could become hundreds of millions of dollars richer.

• 25:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Are there still local numbers games, albeit underground in cities?

• 25:30Nick Capodice?

  There are not much, honestly. And, and part of that is due to the astronomical payout of the big lotteries. How can $600 compared to 600 million?

• 25:40Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, I've always wondered this, and I'm gonna guess that the answer is fairly straightforward. But in terms of those massive payouts, how is that possible? Like, how much money does the lottery itself actually make? Because you have to staff this operation, right?

• 25:55Nick Capodice?

  I have some stats from 2015. So first, as a comparison, corporate income taxes in 2015 generated $49 billion. State lotteries generated $67 billion.

• 26:10Hannah McCarthy?

  And did all of that money go back into the states?

• 26:13Nick Capodice?

  No, not all of it. And this answers your question. 42 billion went into prizes. That's how they have such big jackpots. 3 billion went to advertising and administration of the lottery, leaving about $21 billion that went back into the states.

• 26:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, where does that money go? I've heard that the lottery supports, for example, education in a lot of states.

• 26:33Nick Capodice?

  Did you ever see The Simpsons where there's like a, it's like a massive lottery? But there's already one big winner. Our state school system, which gets fully half the profits from the lottery.

• 26:41Speaker 07

  Just think what we can buy with that money. History books that know how the Korean War came out. Math books that don't have that basics crap in them. Uh, yeah, it can be argued both ways, right? And, you know, I would say to you that, that it varies state to state. Okay? Different states have a different arrangement, uh, for where that money goes. In New York, there is a fallacy that it goes to education. Well, only in the most, only in the most sort of symbolic sense does it go to education, which is to say, the state education budget in New York is determined by a formula. Right?

• 27:19Nick Capodice?

  As a hypothetical Hannah with wildly inaccurate numbers, let's say New York set its education budget at $1 million. And the lottery has a great year and has $750,000 left over.

• 27:32Speaker 07

  That doesn't mean that the state is now gonna give $1,750,000 towards education. The state is still just gonna give $1 million to education. But the lottery had a big, huge year, and that means that if we take, you know, now we can take that $750,000 that came in from the lottery, remove it from education and just spend it elsewhere. In the budget, right? The phrasing is it's a substitute, not a supplement.

• 28:00Nick Capodice?

  Have any of you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers, whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 28:45Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code CIVICS at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 29:07Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming, and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one, because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something, to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one-stop-shop platform for making a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything, and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes, and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

• 29:50Nick Capodice?

  So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  In 1964, New Hampshire made $5.7 million selling $3 sweepstakes tickets. Right before the sweepstakes, New Hampshire was the 45th state as far as money that the state put towards education. And then after the sweepstakes, New Hampshire was 45th among 50 states as to what it put towards local education.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  Furthermore, once something becomes a kind of structural element of the budget, then it cannot be reduced, right? The only way to reduce it is to cut the good itself, the schools or the hospitals or whatever it's supporting, which nobody wants, right? Or to continue to support schools and hospitals, but there's only one way to do that, and that is taxes, right? And you see how literally impossible it is, you know, raising taxes is a, you know, blood sport in American politics. So you are in effect committing yourself.

• 31:13Hannah McCarthy?

  I know the odds of winning a big jackpot are slim, but just for curiosity's sake, how slim are we talking? How far am I from becoming a multi-billionaire?

• 31:23Nick Capodice?

  There was a big mega millions jackpot in Florida in January of 2021. It was $750 million. The odds of winning it are 1 in 302 million. Statistically, you are 10 times more likely to become the President of the United States than that. But that sum, that number, that staggering sum, you can't ignore that kind of a payout.

• 31:50Speaker 07

  I'm drawn in by the magnetism of this vast obscene sum of money that has attracted me to this game. And so I'll play my dollar, right? And, you know, lottery executives used to use the joke, it's like, most, most players think there's really, the odds are 50/50, either I win or I don't, right? You know, and in some ways, that is a kind of true feeling, okay, let me try, you know, either I win or I don't, right? And, and, you know, it, it speaks to a kind of mentality for how we organize our society. Like, are we all just sort of slowly kind of taking our turn, winning a modest sum? of money? Or are we willing to sort of, you know, assume that we're never going to win on the infinitesimal

• 32:34Speaker 07

  chance that if we do, we're going to be hyper rich?

• 32:38Nick Capodice?

  There is an expression that lotteries are, quote, "a tax on the poor." And I don't want to go too much into that expression, but I want to make two points related to it. First, yes, Americans in lower income brackets spend more money on lottery tickets. But, second, these games are marketed towards people with less money. The ads for lotteries are not aimed at wealthy Americans. And their slogans are things like...

• 33:08Speaker 01

  New York Lotto. All you need is a dollar and a dream.

• 33:13Nick Capodice?

  A survey from 2006 found that one in three Americans who make less than $25,000 a year think the lottery represents the most practical way for them to accumulate significant savings.

• 33:25Speaker 07

  It, you know, it speaks to like our ideas about distribution of, of, of wealth and inequality, right? It's like, look, I'd rather have, I'll skip having a decent chance of winning a modest sum in favor of having an infinitesimally small chance of having a grossly outrageously large sum of, you know, $670 million, right? It's, and it tracks very closely with the, with the time period of like where, you know, inequality becomes a disaster in, in American life since the late 1970s.

• 33:57Hannah McCarthy?

  That fantasy, that you won't win enough money to just pay off your student loans or put a down payment on a car, but you'll win enough to buy an island and a helicopter to get you to that island. And all of that because you spent a dollar on a lottery ticket. I mean, nonexistent odds or not, that is a tempting dream.

• 34:18Nick Capodice?

  And back to the civics part, for state budgets, this influx of cash from people buying these lottery chances, these fantasies, it is a dream come true. And you know what? If I could just add one more tidbit that I find fascinating, I had forgotten completely about this. The people who win those massive jackpots, they end up having to pay about 37% of their winnings back to state and federal government for income tax.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  If you want to say gambling is bad for individuals, can't necessarily argue that. But the people really addicted to lotteries are the states that run them, that rely on the revenue. They're the ones who are really addicted to the lottery.

• 35:22Nick Capodice?

  The lottery. There's always been a lottery. That's it. Did any of you out there get Kevin's sly hint as to which Supreme Court Justice bought a ticket? Brag at us on Twitter at Civics 101 Pod. I'm going to put the answer in this week's newsletter, which you can subscribe to at civics101podcast.org. Today's episode was produced by me, Nikita Deche, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you.

• 35:44Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you. Our staff includes Christina Phillips and Jackie Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer and NHPR's very own golden octopus.

• 35:52Nick Capodice?

  Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Sir Cubworth, Trucky Birthday, Proletur, Moore and Gardner, Meter, Ari De Niro, Chris Sabriski, and the Sony Venetum Wind Quartet.

• 36:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 36:06Nick Capodice?

  Lottery.

• 36:19Hannah McCarthy?

  I once won a big basket in a raffle.

• 36:24Nick Capodice?

  What was in it?

• 36:25Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm on.

• 36:28Nick Capodice?

  Is it just a basket?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Looking for a horror podcast that isn't murder to get through? Then check out another effing horror podcast. Our show, where paranormal and true crime stories collide with unfiltered commentary. I'm Monique Sanchez. And I'm Amy Traden. Each week, Monique and I share one paranormal story. And one true crime case. From unexplained phenomena to true tales of murder and mayhem, we find the stories you haven't heard before and research them obsessively to bring them to life. Follow or watch another effing horror podcast wherever you get your podcasts.