Every week most of us hear the exhortations from our state governments to buy lottery tickets. The average lottery player spends about $150 per month in the US and ranges from $46 in North Dakota to almost $900 in Massachusetts. Participation in lotteries is heavily skewed to low income households -- i.e. the ones that can least afford to lose their money, i.e. the ones who when they reach retirement age tell us that they have not been able to save any money.
Let's consider an alternate scenario, one in which the states exhorted these people to be prudent rather than reckless. Imagine that the average person were to put $150 per month into an IRA account. With reasonable investment return assumptions, those people would have about a half million dollars in that account after 45 years!
Government is supposed to be serving the best interests of the public. Clearly in this case they are working only to serve the best interests of government.
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