When you play the lottery, you are essentially betting on numbers. If you’re lucky enough to pick the right combination of numbers, you’ll walk away with a large sum of money. You might even be able to buy your dream home or new car with the winnings. However, if you want to increase your chances of winning, you should avoid choosing numbers that are associated with special events or birthdays. It’s better to stick to the obvious choices, like 1 through 31.

Despite the fact that there’s no guarantee you’ll win, many people find the odds of winning a lottery to be appealing. The odds are lower than with other types of gambling, such as slot machines or horse racing, but the prizes can still be substantial. For this reason, some people choose to gamble with the money they would otherwise have spent on things such as gas or groceries.

The first lottery-like games appeared in the Low Countries in the fifteenth century, where they were used to fund town fortifications and help the poor. By the seventeenth century, the practice spread to England. One English lottery, in 1667, marketed itself as “a good way of saving and providing for your family.” It was also a get-out-of-jail-free card: participants were exempt from paying fines for almost any crime except piracy or murder.

But while the lottery’s popularity is undeniable, it’s also true that it’s not exactly a model of sound fiscal policy. As the author of a recent essay in The New York Times points out, state lotteries pay out a respectable percentage of their sales in prize money—and that reduces the proportion of ticket sales that are available to the states for use on public services such as education. To keep ticket sales robust, states have to make sure that the odds of winning remain attractive—and that means that prize amounts must rise, and that the percentage of ticket prices that go to the state must also rise.

In the nineteen-sixties, Cohen argues, that arrangement collapsed under the strain of swelling populations, rising inflation, and the costs of the Vietnam War. The result was a budget crisis that threatened to reduce state services or raise taxes, both of which were deeply unpopular.

Lottery advocates were quick to respond. They stopped arguing that a statewide lottery would float most of a state’s budget and began instead to emphasize how much it would cost to fund one line item—usually education, but sometimes veterans’ benefits or public parks. That approach gave them a veneer of moral legitimacy that dispelled long-standing ethical objections to gambling.

But a more significant shift occurred in the late twentieth century, when state lotteries moved beyond their original mission and into an ideological battleground. By promoting themselves as “taxes on the stupid,” lotteries obscured their regressivity and made it more difficult to argue against them. Then, in the early twenty-first century, a wave of antitax revolts swept through America’s middle class and Rust Belt.