You think those are bad, look at the PA lottery commercials. Go over to youtube & search, “Gus, the second most famous groundhog”.
His tagline is, “Keep on scratchin’” It’s true, too. Every time one of those @#$%&* commercials comes on, I wanna scratch my eyes & ears out!
I don’t think I’ve ever bought a scratch-off lottery ticket. Even the best games are something like 500:1 odds & then you only win $500. That won’t even cover round trip airfares somewhere.
I will occasionally buy one of the two big ones when they get up to change-your-family’s-life levels, like kids, grandkids, & great-grandkids will never need to work in their life as they can live off the investments. My expenditure for the year is usually less than the cost of a movie ticket (w/o popcorn). Hey, lightning could strike!
Why are they so bad? I thought the lottery lump sum payout was somewhere in the 60% range - get $1 million @ $50m / year over the next 20 years or $600m today. Decently invested, you’d end up with the same amount. Yeah, most people won’t invest it instead go out & buy stuff. However, if that stuff gives them joy is it such a bad deal? I always assumed that if you called them up they offer you something like 40-50% lump sum payout, making a cool $100-200m. Do they offer even less than that?
Oh sure, lottery ads just incite the vulnerable, but ya gotta raise that revenue, eh?
FWIW when the jackpot gets real big I’ll grab one ticket just for the fun of thinking of all the “adios, suckers” moves I could come up with once I retained some really goid lawyers…
The whole lottery thing is appalling IMO. Twenty years ago I was posted to Canadian Forces Base Borden but my wife was still in Ottawa, so I regularly drove between them through a series of (I apologize in advance) one-horse town/redneck centrals. I stopped for gas once at a little place called McArthurs Mills and taped to the counter they had a petition. A petition for a new library perhaps? A public health nurse? School supplies? Oh no. They had a petition for a 6/49 machine.
Another time I was in a convenience store in Angus, adjacent to the base (the joke, btw, is that if you remove the letter G from the name “Angus”, you will get an accurate description of the town) and there was this lowlife mother telling her kid to shut-up and sit on the floor while she played her Nevada tickets.
And it was in the greeting card section of an Angus pharmacy that I discovered that there were special birthday cards with internal flaps in case you wanted to give someone a lottery ticket for their birthday.
One of my high school math teachers used to refer to lotteries as Canada’s stupidity tax.
The problem is that by definition most of the people who buy masses of lottery tickets aren’t very good at personal finance. When they’ve been on food stamps and suddenly have a million dollars, it seems like such an unimaginably large amount of money that they consider it limitless. In the end 70% of big lottery winners end up bankrupt in a few years.
Powerball, Mega Millions Lotto is pulling out of Illinois because, among other issues like the state having no budget, the company tasked with running the lottery — Northstar Lottery Group — failed to award more than 40 percent of the grand prizes in its biggest instant ticket games, sometimes ending games before any top prizes were claimed.
Nothing like funking the running of a lottery. Maybe you’ll have better luck playing the Illinois Medicaid game.
No, I was making a comparison between the marketing strategies of the lottery with those of structured settlement consolidating. I wasn’t talking about a lottery lump sum.
Although, now that you mention it, one redeeming feature of the Canadian lottery scams is that the full face value is paid out as a lump sum, and furthermore it’s all tax free. If you win a $25M jackpot, you actually get a check for that full amount. Beyond that, it’s still a scam because the odds of winning are essentially non-existent. Well, OK, I won $5 once!
Does Ontario even have enough money to pay out lottery winnings? Illinois is so broke that they cannot pay out any significant amount and at least one multi-state lottery has threatened to pull out of the state until they pass a budget.
I assumed the OP meant you don’t know anyone who won the lottery well enough that they will give you a slice or that you particularly care about their wellbeing.
A friend who was stationed at CFB Borden back in the early '80s used to call it “Anguish,” but that may have just been him being polite around his parents.
Hey, if you’re in California, I wrote that law about child support. I was working for the state legislature when the lottery initiative was passed, and after some deadbeat who owed child support won the big prize, I helped put together a measure to require that background check before you could receive the money.
I did, however, personally vote against the lottery measure, and was very sorry that it passed. At least I helped some kids get their back child support.
No, there was a California initiative (voted on by the public, rather than the legislature), to create the lottery. I felt, and still feel, that the lottery is a tax on the poor and innumerate, and voted against that measure. I was extremely disappointed when it passed.
Within a year of the establishment of the lottery, a gentleman in Southern California won a big prize. It turned out that this gentleman owed substantial child support, but at the time, the only recourse was for his ex-wife to hire a lawyer and try to sue him to recover some of the money. The state legislator for whom I worked at the time wanted to introduce a measure to prevent this situation from occurring again. The law already established that back taxes owed would be taken out of your lottery winnings before they were paid to you. I helped to create and present to committee a measure that would apply this same process to back child support. The measure was passed and signed and is still the law in California.
