Quote Originally Posted by Rogar Demonblud View Post
I'm not sure how it works where you live (Sweden, isn't it?), but here in the U.S. the state takes 50-70% of the lottery money off the top and uses it to fund the bureaucracy and various political pet projects (for instance, North Dakota hired private security forces to go after the protestors during the DAPL thing a couple years ago). Youth sports are generally controlled by the school districts, and paid for out of property taxes (and some ticket sales).

Naturally, there is no such thing as transparency involved. Yet another thing to invest sweat equity in.
Technically Finland, but for anything happened before 1809 Sweden. The countries are, however, very very similar. And I watch mostly Swedish tv. So clearly quite different approaches how to organise a lottery. Even the privately owned gambling companies pay out around 95% winnings (at least that's what they advertise to attract players).

Because I was now curious, and because I could, I went and hunted down the numbers for the state monopoly (all gaming not just lottery, lottery represents somewhere about 25-30% of it). It's not as good as I thought actually. Roughly 45% of revenue are paid out as winnings. Of the remaining part, ~1.7 B last year, 60% goes to charitable* causes, 9% fees to distributors, 12% is state lottery tax and 19% goes to administration. *Charitable here means supporting various sports, veterans, culture, social-health and research activities. Though the company itself doesn't pick these. Though spitballing it ends up being somewhere close to 80% of revenue going back to "society", players, charitable causes and state. I guess it's not that bad.