Tag: South Carolina

Over the past two decades, state lotteries have nearly doubled in size, driving a multibillion-dollar wealth transfer from low-income U.S. communities to powerful multinational companies.A nationwide investigation of state lotteries by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland found that lottery retailers are disproportionately clustered in lower-income communities in nearly every state. The investigation's analysis of cellphone location data shows that the people who patronize those stores come from the same kinds of communities.Once rare, lotteries now operate in all but five U.S. states. Driven by more than a half-billion dollars in annual ad spending, lottery ticket sales have grown from $47 billion to $82 billion since 2005, according to La F...