The John Locke Foundation could have told you — and has told you, in fact — that the state lottery is a sucker bet for North Carolina.
The latest Bloomberg Businessweek offers more evidence in the form of a new Bloomberg Rankings Sucker Score, which “represents the portion of personal income a state’s residents lose on lotteries.”
The higher the score, the more the state’s residents are suckers for the state-run lottery. North Carolina’s score is 17, or 17.4 in the magazine’s print version. That puts the Tar Heel State in about the middle of the pack among the 43 states that operate lotteries. Georgia has the highest sucker score — 37 — while North Dakota scores a 4. Seven states do not offer a state-run lottery.
The magazine tells us North Carolina’s “average annual lottery spending per adult” is $195.94, while the “percentage of total ticket sales paid out in prizes” is 58.9 percent.
