The Lottery Nightmare

I’m really glad I didn’t win the big lottery earlier this week. This is apparently out of sync with the thinking of many people. The only way the Mega Millions Lottery could have reached $1.6 billion on Tuesday is if people had bought about $3.5 billion worth of tickets. Half of sales is paid back out to the jackpot and smaller prizes. “The remaining 50 percent is used to pay for the states' retailer commissions, vendor fees, lottery administration, and the state beneficiaries or good causes of that state.” 

 But I am not in the minority. According to Money Watch, the number of people playing the lottery has dropped from almost 70% in the 1980s to about half today. And the benefit to the states is not working out exactly as planned either. For example, in most cases the states that intended the money to go for education don’t add lottery funds to their education budget. “Instead, they use the lottery money to pay for the education budget, spending the money that would have been used on education if there wasn't a lottery budget on other things.”

But that doesn’t explain why I’m glad I didn’t win. Winning a lottery that size would be way too much trouble! 

Numbers that large are far beyond most people’s comprehension. We hear about billions and trillions in government spending so often that they seem familiar, but they really are not. People who are 30 years old have not yet lived a billions seconds. Spending those lottery winnings at one dollar per second would take over 30 years!

But let’s take a more practical (?) look at the situation. Winning $1.6 billion and taking the lump sum and paying the taxes would leave about $570 million, give or take. Invest that money at 4% after taxes. Now try to find a way to spend $200,000 a day, five days a week (taking weekends and holidays off).

 Most people would run out of relatives, ideas and charities in about a month or two. But you wouldn’t run out of money for about 15 years! What a dreary way to spend the next half a billions seconds of your life – every morning having to find a new and worthwhile way to spend another $200,000! And the next day start all over again. The whole time you would be trying to keep the entire situation secret or face the onslaught of other people with marvelous ideas about how to spend your money – letters, emails, phone calls, etc. The choice is isolation or chaos.

Of course with over half a billion dollars, you could always hire someone to operate a charity for you. But in that case, you might as well have won only about five million, easily enough for most people to retire with a great deal less hassle.

But I’m not one to set the rules for others. Let them play their lotteries and face the choice of throwing away a couple of hundred dollars a year (average) or win the nightmare of a lifetime for the bargain price of only two dollars.