Powerball Is Nasty, Corrupt, and Downright Immoral

In California, my home state, the government spent a small fortune several years ago pushing citizens to buy tickets for Powerball. Their ad campaign featured various people walking around Los Angeles and San Francisco, with ping pong balls raining from the skies, the tune “California Dreamin’” playing in the background. The theme: “Believe in Something Bigger.”

Not God. Not family. Not America.

Your infinitesimal chances of winning the lottery.

That’s because the lottery is an evil scam run by the government to achieve two purposes: first, to suck money out of the pockets of suckers; and second, to reinforce the leftist fantasy that wealth descends on human beings through luck.

Here is the sad fact about Powerball: it’s a way for the government to make money off of people, typically those who can least afford it. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com estimates 1.008 billion tickets will be sold today for the $1.5 billion jackpot, and says that there is a 97 percent chance there will be at least one winner. Your chances of winning, however, are negligible – despite the massive payout, the expected value of a lottery ticket (probability of winning times amount of payout) is still well under $2.

But the big winner, no matter what, will be the government:

Americans spent about $1.9 billion bringing this lottery from $40 million in November to $948 million on Saturday. The “real” jackpot — if you took the cash payout, rather than the structured annuity — was only $587 million….Consistently participating in a lottery with a very negative expected value is a great way to lose a lot of money over a period of time.

And sadly, the people who play the lottery regularly are the people who can least afford to do so. According to a 2008 study reported by PBS, households with incomes under $13,000 per year spend 9 percent of that on lottery tickets. As PBS also pointed out, “you are 17 times more likely to get hit by falling airplane parts than you are to win the lottery.” Even if that lottery spending statistic is off by a factor of three, as Business Insider suggests, there’s no question that poor people are suckered by the lottery more often than rich people.

And as Michelle Malkin points out, desperation drives the lottery:

During the 2008 recession, 29 of 42 states with lotteries saw huge spikes in lottery sales — with sales records set in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where purchases are greatest in the states’ poorest counties.

Which leads to the second problem with the lottery: the immoral reinforcement of a false notion that wealth strikes people randomly. In fact, it doesn’t, as the lottery itself demonstrates: a wildly disproportionate number of people who win the lottery end up poor again, because the type of people who play the lottery regularly are the type of people who make poor financial decisions.

As Chase Stephens points out:

According to the National Endowment for Financial Education, 70 percent of people who suddenly come into a large sum of money, from a lottery win or similar circumstance, end up losing it all within a few years.

But the media will keep pushing the lottery because it’s a story, and the government will keep pushing it because it’s a scam. Meanwhile, the government will continue to tax those who are responsible with their money to pay those who aren’t – because, after all, the government isn’t just a benevolent god showering riches on the undeserving and the deserving alike, it’s a great moral redistributionist.