Lottery

While partially listening to the radio the other day, the words "... the lottery is the only tax the poor pay," caught my attention and it was explained that the buying of lottery tickets is primarily done by the poor. Jerry Schocken is not poor but he only buys a ticket when the amount is over thirty million, he buys one for one dollar. I was with him one day while he bought a ticket and he persuaded me to buy one. It was only the second ticket I had ever bought a lottery ticket. I recieved a slip of paper and never looked at it again. (I do not get a newspaper to check out numbers.) Jerry does check the paper. He jokes that he would like to win the lottery "one more time." Is it true that the lottery is a tax? As I recall, the Florida lottery was supposed to give funds to education but that does not stop the politicians from increasing, each year, the amount of the budget going to education. Could it be true the lottery was instituted to get the poor to pay taxes?