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do Americans get taxed on their winnings? If so, what does the Government take out of a big win? 25%, 50% ?
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When you win the Jackpot, do you collect on all the lesser prizes? That is, you’ve matched the 6+1 category, so obviously you have the 6 only, and a bunch of 5’s etc
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Are the odds about one in 175,000,000? That means there are 175,000,000 possible tickets at $2 each. You could buy one of each and be guaranteed a win. Whether or not you make money is another question!
You get taxed as income.
Max Federal rate is currently 35%, but will go to 39.6% at the end of the year as part of the so-called “Fiscal Cliff”.
My state tax would be 7.85%.
No, you win the jackpot, you win the jackpot only.
The Jackpot amounts are paid out over 20 years. To get a lump sum you’ll get around 40% of the total. You only win the top prize on each ticket.
Yes, of course, you could do this. There have been groups of investors who have attempted this very thing in other lotteries.
The logistics of purchasing 175 million tickets for this particular game would be extreme, of course.
With the current estimated jackpot at $550 million, you could, in theory, make money compared to the $350 million outlay. Of course, when the jackpot gets this high, the probability of splitting the jackpot also goes up, so your expected winnings come back down again. Due to splits, I don’t think there’s ever actually a point when the game has a a positive expectation.
You would win something if you bought all ticket combinations but a profit is still not assured. There is no official way to bulk buy tickets with every set of numbers on them. You would need a huge team of people plus ticket machines running 24 hours a day to produce them all in a short period of time. That scheme has been tried before by an investment group and IIRC they won even though they ran out of time before they bought every combination. Even if you bought all the numbers, you still wouldn’t be assured of a profit even with a huge jackpot. Other people might also win and you would have to split the pot with them which could easily result in an overall loss.
I belive powerball is paid out over 30 years.
Most or all lotteries are run by the states. Therefore, they can and do offer the prizes tax-free as an incentive to buy the tickets. But the federal and local governments will still consider the winnings to be taxable income.
If you can print one ticket per second, with no downtime, it would take more than 2000 days to print 175 million tickets.
You can buy up to 5 different number combinations that will be printed on a single ticket. So you can print them all in a mere 400 days!
And, of course, if you spread this out over 200 stores, you can do this in 2 days!
The problem is, first you have to fill out the 35,000,000 ticket slips, and make absolutely sure that each of the 175,000,000 tickets has a unique set of numbers. It defeats the point if you leave a combination out - especially if it happens to be the winning numbers.
Yeah, but what are the odds of that happening?