Lottery

I've never bought a lottery ticket because I'm not a lucky person. For me it would be a waste of money to buy a lottery ticket. This is probably the case for a lot of people who think that they can beat the odds. Nevertheless, if someone wants to spend their hard earned money on lottery tickets it doesn't matter to me. It is completely legal and it's their money to spend as they see fit. The way I see it some people get a little satisfaction, a little excitement, and a little hope from buying lottery tickets.

I'm not really in favor of having a government sponsored lottery because it seems like just another way for the government to fleece the people out of their money - only in a sly and undetected way. But since this is the direction that we have gone as a society we ought to make the best of it and make the lottery system a little more user friendly. In my opinion there should be no taxes on the winnings, there should be more winners, and the taxpayers should be kept abreast of where the lottery money is actually used. Please allow me to address these three problems that I see with the current system.

The first problem that I see with this system is the taxes that the winners have to pay out of their winnings. This is nonsense. Why is there a tax on this money anyway? This is money that the government has given to the rightful winner(s). They shouldn't get any of it back. If a person wins 10 million dollars the government should give him 10 million dollars. It doesn't matter what agreement the state and federal governments have. They shouldn't get any of that money back.

If the government takes 3 million dollars of the winnings for taxes then that is false advertising of sorts by the government. If the truth is that the winner is actually only going to get 7 million dollars then it should be advertised that way. So I think that all taxes should be removed from lottery winnings. The winners will be purchasing taxable items with their winnings anyway, so the various governments (local, state, federal) will get their tax money that way.

The second problem that I think needs to be addressed is the small number of big money lottery winners. I've noticed that sometimes the lottery will get up in the range of 100 or even 200 million dollars. The next thing you hear is that 3 or 4 people have won all of that money. Wouldn't it be better for all lottery players if large sums like that got broken down into smaller increments - maybe 1 million dollar increments? That way we would see 100 or 200 winners instead of just a couple. We could split it even further and make a lot more winners but I just threw that figure out to make the point.

I would propose that once the lottery gets up above a certain point - let's say 50 million dollars - and then is won, the person with the matching numbers would get 2 million dollars and the rest of the money would be split up equally among the next 250 closest numbers. This is just an example meant to make a point but surely you get the idea. The idea behind all of this should be to help a bunch of American Taxpayers get ahead in life by allowing them to pay off their houses and get new cars - not to make one or two people so rich that it ruins their lives. To me this would be a better system that would draw more players and make a lot more winners.

The third problem that I see with the current lottery system is that the American Taxpayers are not kept informed about where all of this lottery money goes - the money that the government gets from the lottery, that is. There is probably some obscure website that one could dig through to get some answers, but I think that the government should make it a point to use part of their earnings to advertise where the money is being used. [After all, the (federal) government doesn't seem to have a problem using government money to advertise for the Army, of all things]. This way the taxpayers could be assured that the money is going where the government said it was going to use it. As it is now, the general public isn't sure where that money goes.

Whether winnings, earnings and uses of lottery money is done in the newspapers, on television, on billboards or some other means, the states that sponsor these lotteries need to be kept accountable to the American Taxpayers. That's only right. If we are going to have a lottery let's do it so that the taxpayers are the ones who benefit from it. As for me, I'll keep my money in my pocket - because I know that buying lottery tickets would be like throwing money out the window. I'm not a lucky person.