The Texas Lottery has announced its sales for fiscal year 2024. While it was the second-best year in sales, the lottery generated just $2 billion in revenue for distribution to education and veteran services.
The vast majority (75 percent) of the lottery’s $8 billion in annual revenue is spent on administering the lottery, advertising, payouts, and other costs.
To put the $2 billion in context, the fiscal year 2024 total state revenue is $165.9 billion, according to the comptroller, making the lottery’s contribution 1 percent of the total.
When it comes to education, $1.98 billion is allocated to public school spending. Overall education revenues have been in the $58 billion to $60 billion range over the past three fiscal years, meaning the lottery’s revenue is just 3 percent of total education funding.
When it was established in the early 1990s, the lottery was marketed to Texans as a way to fund education. But in the 28 years that a portion of lottery revenue has been guaranteed to fund education, it’s paid for only a handful of days yearly.
Cumulatively, the lottery hasn’t paid for a year of education since it was formed.
The lottery is played largely by lower-income households, making less than $50,000 per year, and a larger percentage of their income is spent on lottery purchases. Across multiple games, the median amount spent playing the lottery was twice as much for a player making less than $12,000 annually than for someone making more than $100,000.
A family of four making $60,000 or less annually qualifies for welfare benefits.
This year’s lottery earnings report comes as the organization is up for Sunset Review, which means it is under a legislative microscope.
On a rolling basis, state agencies are reviewed for performance, and lawmakers consider various options for adjusting operations or ending agencies altogether.
Lottery Commission bureaucrats want to be removed from the review process, but two recent developments at the commission suggest lawmakers would be better off rejecting this recommendation.
The latest scandals that rocked the gambling bureaucrats at the Lottery Commission include a rigging scandal that allowed out-of-state buyers to win a massive jackpot and the abuse of their power in 2020 to push the lottery onto teens in Texas and beyond.
