Whoever might win the Powerball lottery this week, assuming someone draws the right set of numbers, will claim about $1.5 billion before taxes. That’s the equivalent of a year’s worth of work at gross wages of $720,000 per hour. It’s enough, should the winner choose to invest in real estate, to afford to buy all of the residential property in the town of Heber City and have enough left over to buy each and every resident of that city a new car worth $30,000.

In other words, the amount of cash up for claim is simply outrageous. We would argue, in fact, that it is obscene. The chances of winning are infinitesimal, yet dollars pour from purses and wallets. In Texas, officials estimate that when sales peaked before the last weekend drawing, the state was selling $1.2 million worth of tickets every minute. People who live in states where the lottery is not offered have traveled in droves to the nearest outlets. At a convenience store just over the Utah border in Malad, Idaho, people waited for up to three hours to purchase a piece of paper that will turn out to be redeemable only for a few days of vain hope of suddenly becoming absurdly wealthy.

Sure, it’s easy to look at it as a bit of harmless fun, but it really isn’t. For one thing, the lure of a giant jackpot leads people in low-income levels, struggling to make ends meet, to spend dollars they can’t afford for a chance of reversing their fortunes. A 2010 study showed that people with annual household incomes of below $13,000 spend an average of $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of their take-home pay. If they put that money instead into a typical mutual fund, they could accumulate nearly $10,000 in 10 years.

It amounts to the most regressive of taxes at a time when politicians of all stripes are bellowing about the need to address the issue of income inequality. If they were sincere in helping the financial situations of the poor, they would move to ban lotteries nationwide. But the system has become a source of revenue that governments are now addicted to.

The state of New York, which has taken action to ban daily fantasy sports sites because they are too much a game of chance instead of skill, happily rakes in nearly $10 billion a year from lotteries that are clearly nothing but games of chance. This is more than just ironic. It is clear evidence of intentional myopia toward just how outsized and monstrous we have allowed this lottery culture to become.

As a way to sustain public revenues, the lottery is not very efficient. Studies show that of the billions spent on lottery tickets, less than a third of the money ends up in public coffers. A recent study by a political science professor in Indiana shows that states using lotteries to generate funds for education end up spending less on education after a period of years than they would have otherwise.

And even those who win the big prize aren’t guaranteed happiness. The stories of misery encountered by lottery winners are well known and often repeated. Yet, when the numbers grow large, so many of us are moved to grab a ticket and indulge in daydreams of how we will spend our newfound fortune. But take a step back and look at the numbers. We’ll see an economy based on false promises and the exploitation of hope. And we’ll see how we have allowed it to flourish to a level, measured by the amount in the current Powerball drawing, which is simply grotesque.