Inflation has nothing to do with a price jump in a lottery.
Not exactly, for two reasons.
First, "a million dollars isn't what it used to be". Say we had had a lottery in 1940? Tickets would probably have not cost a dollar as a dollar then had the value of a dime today. It would have a dime or nickel price and yield prizes in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars. Project that back even further and the numbers get even more rediculious by modern standards. If they never raised the price, they would still be selling tickets and having prizes at that level.
Second, at least in my state, and I suspect others, since the lottery is "off-budget" spending its own money without a tax appropriation from the legislature, it is a nest of triple and quadruple feather-bedded no-work political jobs. These keep the "cost of administration" very high, far higher than they would be even in a regular government program, let alone a private industry. Wages, etc, have certainly gone up many multiples since 1975 or so.