Lotteries are a tax on the innumerate. Always have been.
They forgot to add newspapers.
So someone is FORCING them to take out loans, play the lottery and so on?
Under the guise of "helping" the poor, it's another encroachment on state and individual rights.
Also, none other than Alexander Hamilton played the lottery. The 1st Continental Congress authorized a lottery to help pay for the Revolutionary War.
"Everybody, almost, can and will be willing to hazard a trifling sum for the chance of considerable gain." - A. Hamilton
Buying a lottery ticket is a voluntary activity.
If “the poor” who don’t pay income or property taxes buy them and thus contribute something to the coffers of the government who’s high spending they support, I say fantastic.
The more money they get from the lottery and from slot machines the less they have to take involuntarily via taxation.
I think allowing elites to eat fois gras and play the markets is form of political corruption.
I am really hesitant to jump on the anti-payday loan bandwagon.
Sometimes people need quick cash, and it’s an easy option which doesn’t require messing with one’s credit rating, or involving any of the major credit rating agencies or banks.
It’s just easy, quick, and fairly anonymous. Yes, it can be painful, but it’s an option. I’ve used it to SAVE my credit rating. It was expensive, but I know those who’ve used it as a tool to save their good credit rating when they might otherwise have a ding on their regular credit.
The big banks love their usurious fees and high interest rates, too, and they’d LOVE for payday lenders to go out of business.
I’m suspicious that shutting them down would suit the crony capitalists just fine.
Those "payday loans" and check-cashing joints are also sure markers that you are in a bad neighborhood. As are pawn-shops and battered storefronts advertising "E-Z" payments.
bttt
I have no problem with the lottery. It is at least a tax that is voluntary. Besides, my wife plays it to the tune of $4 a week. Now we have won here and there including over $1,200. once. That being said, too many idiots spend several dollars a day on the lottery, but no one forces them to do it.
LOL, the only tax WaPo doesn’t like is one that’s completely voluntary.
I gotta come up with a different retirement plan?
The poor are not being swindled. The government and the socially concerned finance sector are coming together to help poor people avoid the kind of oppression that is found when one leaves the protective embrace of government social service programs. By helping these people maintain a qualifying low income they can remain on public assistance and only a mean spirited meanie would want them to have to work for a living.
In effect all of these “abuses” are means of recycling unearned welfare payments, often partially funding parasitic welfare programs.
"Here government is raising revenue by selling the Powerball creating intergenerational deadbeats with EBT, Section 8, 0bamaCare, 0bamaPhone, Social Security, Medicaid, TANF, etc. dream of wealth without work"
This is to funny! Friend told me today. Well not for my friends girlfriend! She is as bright as a box of rocks when it comes to math. She did one of those loans for her POS car and got $2600.00. She now owes after 1 year, 5500.00! 110% interest for 1 year. Sad.
I guess I will send him this link! lol
When the lottery began here in California, by law 51% went back to players in the form of prizes, and the pots grew fast. Now the state skims off so much, the jackpot merely inches up a million or so each drawing, no matter how large the jackpot. Nowadays, you rarely see a jackpot over $20 million (although I think it’s over $50 million at the moment). F’n tax-sucking SOBs.
And, no, playing the lottery doesn’t mean you are dumb or innumerate.
Duh. People who have little are more likely to dream of the big win, where those who are relatively well off are focused more on making more. The lottery is not viewed as the way out if you have skills or a profession.
If someone who makes 20,000 a year spends 2 dollars a week on lottery tickets, they have spent five times more, proportionally speaking, than someone who makes a $100,000 a year and who spends the same amount on lottery tickets. At some point the equation is dominated by the amount you make, not the amount you spend.
... and that the poor are more likely to view the lottery as an investment. “This could be your ticket out,” promised one typical billboard in a distressed Chicago neighborhood.
Because the poor, for whatever reason, often lack marketable skills and education. There are other behavioural tendencies found in concentrations of poor people which impede sustained financial success, so the 'big win' is seen as perhaps a more viable means of 'moving up' than hard work at a menial job. (The term 'concentrations' implies urban poor.)
Bad spending habits don't help, and I have noticed the WIC tags on the grocery store shelves did not impress me as being on items that might be the best value. I don't see that part of the problem going away any time soon, but it does explain why many winners of the lottery don't do significantly better over the long run.
How about forcing their bosses, grocers, landlords etc to take more of the poor’s money to pay taxes?
That’s the crueler than the lottery and more deceptively advertised.
Time for a good old “I Told Ya So!!!”
IIRC...this was a big part of the arguement against Lotteries when they were being debated in the states