TIME Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.

Current subscribers for full access. Not a TIME subscriber? .

Gambling on a Way to Trim Taxes

With $6.7 billion in sales, state lotteries help pay the bills

The lines snaked for blocks around neighborhood drugstores and newsstands earlier this month as hopeful New Yorkers waited to place their bets. Among them: Governor Mario Cuomo, who stood in the rain for 20 minutes in Manhattan to buy $5 worth of chances. "There's something going on in this state," he said. "It's called greed." No wonder. Fed by three successive drawings that failed to produce a big winner, New York's lottery jackpot had ballooned to a record $22.1 million, the highest ever in North America. (The world's largest: Spain's...

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.