Posted on 01/12/2016 10:48:28 AM PST by Citizen Zed
PEORIA - It's s a staggering number - 1,500,000,000 - and one that has continued to grow as Powerball aficionados and neophytes alike have bought tickets for the largest lottery prize in American history.
But what, exactly, will your $1.5 billion buy you?
To start, assuming you take the lump-sum payment as many people do, rather than annual payouts over 29 years, your prize is projected to be a mere $930 million. Then you pay taxes. Take off 39.6 percent for the maximum federal rate and 3.75 percent for the current Illinois income tax - a total of $403.1 million, rounding off. Still leaves you with a comfortable $526.9 million, give or take a little. (By the way, Illinois lawmakers agreed in December to resume lottery payouts, so you face no delays there.)
Sure, most people will want to keep most of that half-billion bucks for themselves. But if you were to use it differently, there's lots you can do. Here's some figures for thought:
- Some states, like Kansas, could actually use the unexpected state tax revenue to eliminate deficits. The Sunflower State has a deficit of about $10 million, the Associated Press reports, and the $40 million-plus from a winner there would more than cover it. There's no such hope in Illinois, where your $34.9 million state tax doesn't put a dent in the deficit estimated into the billions.
- If you devoted every post-tax dime of your winnings to simply paying off the backlog of state bills, you'd cover less than one-twelfth of the $6.3 billion in IOUs awaiting the state comptroller.
- Your winnings would cover only 0.5 percent - one two-hundredth - of the state's unfunded pension liability of more than $100 billion.
- But you could independently operate the city of Peoria - annual budget around $180 million - for just shy of three years.
- Up on the hilltop, you could cover all four years of tuition, room and board - assuming no scholarships - for nearly 3,200 students at Bradley University, to the tune of $41,180 annually.
- Or you could self-fund a winning - or losing - presidential campaign. OpenSecrets.org lists candidate committee spending from Barack Obama in 2012 at $540.8 million and Mitt Romney at $336.4 million. Both also had party funds and super-PAC funds, of course.
- Then again, you could just forget all that and buy yourself a private island and have money to spare. PrivateIslandsOnline.com features one for a mere $44.8 million in Montana, with a 24,000-square-foot house on Flathead Lake.
- But whatever you do, pay no attention to the signs advertising the jackpot. Billboards advertising the Powerball drawing weren't designed with such large prizes in mind. They max out at $999 million.
Of course not. Illinois has been in the grip of Welfare State spending addiction for decades. If a heroin junkie won the Powerball jackpot, he wouldn’t pay off his bills and put something away for retirement. He’d go on a drug binge that probably would kill him.
I’d donate to a bunch of things, like the Wounded Warrior Project, Mayo Clinic, cancer research and not awareness, etc. And I wouldn’t want my name on anything, because I hate attention.
Stopped at a local convenience store this morning around 9:30 to buy a couple of tickets.
It was a mad-house. I had to stand in line while both customers ahead of me finished their business.
The lotto machine rejected my form, so the clerk had to enter my numbers manually. I had an old form and had no idea they had changed it. Last time I bought a ticket several years ago for a large pot.
The clerk did say tomorrow really will be a mad-house as people wait until the last hours to buy a ticket.
It’d be sucked right into the public employees pension fund.
What I would buy is real estate (an island in the Caribbean or in Belize), a 3D printer, a yachter (just a small 75 footer), save 55% of it, donate to childhood cancer, other research of medical issues, and youth runaways centers.
However if I win, I will talk to a qualified financial planner.
I would spend it on booze and women, the rest I’d squander.
As long as you keep your priorities in order....
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