Long Odds

Two great truths are that everything except a contradiction has a non-zero probability of happening and truth is stranger than fiction. In that vein, there is the unemployed mortgage worker who won the lottery twice in one week and the 14 year old German boy who was hit by a meteorite and survived. As proof that I'm a geek, I'm still not sure whether I would rather have the $142,919 lottery winnings or having a scar from a falling meteorite.

Lottery is False Advertising?

I was thinking about the lottery yesterday (State lotteries in particular) and came to the realization that they are even more deceitful than you'd think. Lotteries are usually sold as being good for state education as in Connecticut all of the proceeds from lotto ticket sales go to education funding. But this ignores the portion of the "winnings" that is paid back to the state in taxes. This money is treated as income so it the taxes goes back into the general fund of the State. So in essence the state is funding its regular budget with help from the lottery. The other piece of false advertising is that although you can "win" say $10 Million, after taxes you only get about $5 million. So you are winning the money from the same organization that is taking it back from you. Shouldn't the state lotteries have to advertise what the post tax winning are since you have don't actually receive the whole lotto jackpot from them? (They usually take the taxes out before sending you a check.) an illustration of this is a women in Greenwich who won a $8.8 million jackpot in November of 2007. She just claimed the jackpot this week and took the lump sum payment of $3.8 million after taxes. So by taking that one time payment, with taxes she actually received less than half of the advertised jackpot. This just seems not only unfair, but like fraud to me.

Writer's Note: I do not play the lottery. I discourage others from doing so for many reasons.