They don't, it's a scam. Other than that the fact that money is fungible (so sending lottery money to schools really doesn't mean anything), when you crack open the books (which is never done, and there are always contracts that include never doing it), they don't make money. In Illinois, which has always had a huge lottery, it never even broke even. Lotteries are just one of the many vehicles for politician self-dealing.
I did some googling and then Illinois lottery did make a loss in 2015 due to increased advertising spend: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20150917/NEWS02/1509...
Apart from that I don't see any evidence for your claims. Do you have a link?
For those that aren’t aware, this was the basic history.
Casinos are bad. Ban them.
Casinos are bad, but maybe profitable. Let’s have a few, but we’ll put them on 19th century style paddlewheel riverboats, and make the boat go out into the river for an hour long cruise to limit access.
Okay, the boat can remained docked, but it will still “cruise” for an hour before people are allowed on and off.
Okay, so maybe the boat can actually be in an artificial pond, that’s only about a foot bigger than the boat, as long as that “boat in a moat” is within some small number of miles from an approved gambling river. These boats will also “go cruising”, and since they are boats, they will be regulated by the US Coast Guard, and be required to have enough life jackets for the maximum occupancy of the boat, even though if the boat were to “sink” it would only fall 12 inches to the bottom of the moat.
Okay, so maybe the boats don’t have to “cruise” and people can just come and go from the gambling floor whenever they want.
Okay. Let’s just have a regular casino in a regular building, nowhere near a river.
It’s not totally extractive but they are obviously still profitable.
The thing is, everyone gambled before legalization. You didn’t even need a bookie, every online casino has taken bets from US citizens and then pay no taxes to the state or country.
Bookies are even worse than online casinos because they offer a line of credit and later coerce you to give up your business, sell drugs, etc.
All in all it’s very similar to drugs. People are going to do it anyway, might as well make it legal.
You can contact any casino and request to be excluded from play indefinitely. You can set deposit limits and cannot lift them for a month at a time. There’s some “harm reduction” required by law.
"People are going to do it anyway" -- wrong, some people are going to do it. Many will not if it's illegal.
Sports gambling has been legal in the UK and other parts of the EU for a long time.
Betting on horses and dogs, too, has been legal for forever.
Gambling addiction is real. It affected my family.
It's like a tax on society, except that it often most negatively affects the people who can least afford to be taxed, and then it usually just goes to greedy people rather than funding public works. At least lotteries supposedly go towards public projects. But again, you are taking proportionately more from the most desperate and poor people in that case which is the opposite of how a tax should work.