Nope, not a Federal law. There are states that allow you to use a debit card to buy lottery tickets.
I don’t own a home, but the last one I did was paid off long before I sold it. I am retired now living (well) off the growth and interest on my assets. I have no offspring or extended family worthy of mention.
In some sense I am a jackpot winner. But it was the “jackpot” of decades of hard work at skilled labor, only slightly shitty luck, and no true financial catastrophes. Unless you count losing 95% of my then-net worth in 2008 
& having to get it all back and more since then.
There’s comfy and then there’s stupid-rich. One (or two … ladies?) can live very differently in those two scenarios. Tonight’s Powerball draw is in just a few hours as I type. Here’s hoping. 
I get PB/MM semi-regularly. Usually one ticket for each, more if a bigger jackpot but I would be more than happy with a 3 million dollar jackpot. After taxes/whatever, just over one million dollars would be life changing for me. But I understand I have better odds of getting hit by lightning while being bitten by a platypus than winning one of these mega lotteries, but it does give me the right to daydream. I enjoy daydreaming.
I do scratch-offs once in a blue moon. I will make a scratch-off last a week or two, only revealing a couple per night. The state will list how many winning scratch-offs have been cashed in per game, so that is a little bit of an edge that will influence which game I buy. Obviously newer games will have more available winners. Smarter and much more addicted people than I, use this data, especially for the more expensive games.
A five dollar ticket would probably change me from a semi-regular buyer to a big jackpot only buyer. If they want to “make a buzz” by the size of the jackpot, raise the size of the base jackpot, it’s not like they are not making money off all of us idiots.
Yes and Illinois and others allow subscriptions and online sales that are inherently e-commerce.
I think the surprising aspect is Florida’s lag here.
Florida has a lot of inertia as a blue-nosed Southern state. Which then in the 1970s - 2000s took on urbanized pretensions of real Progress with the vast growth in wealth & influx of educated Northerners.
Then post-2000 slowly being replaced by Southern-fried Conservatism now rapidly giving way to De-Sanctified raging MAGAtism.
Mega Millions is sort of bullshit anyway. It’s false advertising. The jackpots rarely get up to the Kilo Millions.
If they renamed it MAGA Millions it might get that big. Tax on stupidity and all that stuff.
– Signed
Powerball Player Guy
The advertized jackpot is bullshit. You can end up with something close to the full prize if you take small annuity payments over time, 30 years or more. Most people do not want to wait and take the cash option, which is half of the full prize. That is all the money that the lottery has, half of the grand prize. They could not pay you the full prize even if you wanted them too. Say you won a 20 million dollar jackpot. So you get 10.
Then you pay income taxes on your one time windfall. Federal will be about 38% and I live in a high tax state with another 10%, so there goes another half. If you have a spouse you split it with her/them. Courts take a really dim view if you try to hide this money, if there is a disput they may take more…
So you win 20 milllon dollars and end up with 2 or 3 million. Nice bonus but still all everyone knows is that you won 20 million dollars and they want some.
It doesn’t quite work that way. The cash payout is the amount the lottery would have to invest in an annuity to pay the full amount over the time span. It varies according to the Prime Rate (I think.) Taxes vary. In California, for example, you don’t pay taxes on lottery winnings. The Feds get their cut, of course. The way my accountant figured it for me (over beers) was that if you take the cash payout, you’ll end up with about a third of the advertised jackpot. 20 million will net you about 7, in other words. Not 2 or 3.
Now, states that DO tax winnings are another story. That’s every state except:
- California.
- Florida.
- New Hampshire.
- South Dakota.
- Tennessee.
- Texas.
- Washington.
- Wyoming.
Sorry if you live elsewhere. Which you must, to get so little from a win.
I think some of those just don’t have state income tax.
Yep. Every state on the list except California, as it turns out. But Alaska and Nevada don’t have state income taxes but do tax lottery winnings.
That’s ridiculous.
I had a similar reaction but they seem to include a split with a spouse.
I’ve always used a 40% approximation in greenbacks vs the advertised jackpot prize amount. In other words, lump minus taxes. You know, so my Italian supercar shopping budget is realistic.
See my actual math upthread. 40% is optimistic:
Most states consider “earning a paycheck for physical labor or useful services” and “winning at gambling” to be separate things, and they nearly always tax gambling at a much higher rate than working.
They could adopt a prize structure like our Canadian Lotto Max lottery. We have the progressive jackpot like you’d expect, that goes up until it is won, but there’s a cap in that prize. Depending on the time of year, it’s limited to 50, 60 or 70 million. Everything that would have otherwise gone into that single prize pool is instead split into several 1 million prizes, which are all drawn individually.
This means each single ticket you buy can actually be several tickets in one. If the Max pool is at $50 million, and there are 20 $1 million prizes, you effectively have tickets for 21 different draws. The number of $1 million prizes is effectively unlimited, and any that aren’t won get rolled over to the next draw.
I agree that “more winners” part seems kinda specious reasoning. New! Improved! Better! More! Well, 3 out of 4 ain’t bad.
Here’s my speculation and worth every penny you paid for it.
Let’s talk about the process from the first minimum prize draw through the various progressive draws up to the final draw that hits the jackpot as if it’s a single unit of work. We’ll call that group a “run” to distinguish it from the "draw"s which it comprises.
By charging more for tickets they can offer a bigger base prize. And as we’ve seen, the sooner the prize gets “big”, the more money it attracts faster. So IMO the hope is that each run will a) start bigger, b) grow faster in dollars, and c) sell more tickets by count for each draw along the way.
Which factors collectively have the result that the jackpot will be hit after fewer draws following the initial minimum payout draw.
Given a fixed number of draws per year, shortening the number of draws in a run increases the number of runs you can accomplish in a year. More runs = more jackpots
That’s why I wouldn’t tell anyone I’ve won if I did win.
Frankly, I’ll take after-tax 2-3 million. It would still be more than I had before and I could probably use it in such a manner I’d have a nice (not lavish) place to live comfortably for the rest of my life. But then, I don’t have any illusions that the advertised price is what you actually get so maybe I’m not typical.
As discussed upthread, a more realistic take home amount from the advertised jackpot is 28%. Which on 20M is 4.8M.
@Dallas_Jones assumed one of the winner’s first steps would be to get divorced and thereby split the pot in half with soon-to-be-ex spouse. They also assumed worst-case state income taxes.
My payout figure was based on the cash out amount being about 60% of the annuity, not the 48% you’re quoting. Was I right, was it a higher cash payout in the past? I’m guessing when interest rates were not as high the PV of the money was closer to the annuity value.