Chase Stephens had a piece in Dailywire the other day that came through on my Facebook feed. It was the story of one Cinnamon Nicole, who had spent her entire life savings on Powerball tickets for the recent $1.5 billion jackpot and then established a GoFundMe site in order to recoup her losses when she didn't win. Perhaps the most amazing part of this story is the fact that she was actually able to get people to give her $800 before GoFundMe shut her down.
I'm not sure how I feel about people giving her $800. On one hand, there's the logic that says a Darwin Awards candidate like Cinnamon (or is Nicole her given name?) really should be out her life savings. What she did is a pretty stupid thing to do, and it doesn't bode well that in her GoFundMe plea, she gives evidence of not having even learned from her mistake: she pleads with would-be donors, "With your small donation of at least $1.00, a like and one share, I’m certain that we will be able to pick ourselves up from the trenches of this lost [sic] and spend another fortune trying to hit it big again!" Yes, she is apparently ready to do this again, so on one hand, I'm with Kenyatta Gibson, the GoFundMe user who wrote in response to her plea, “Guuuuuuuuuuurl…….I ‘SWEATERGAAAAAWD’ if I see one person give you one rusty copper penny I will spend ten times what you spent on lottery tickets on PLANE tickets to fly to their humble abode so spoiled in riches that they can afford to make it rain on Sweet Brown like ratchet humans such as you who choose to spend their cash on Remy, Flaming Hot Cheetos, VOSS Water and Powerball , and commence to kicking every single one of their asses!!!” (courtesy Dailywire).
On the other hand, it says something nice about the mercy we're still willing to have on each other that someone would subsidize Cinnamon Nicole's (I'll use both names just to be safe) chronic lack of wisdom.
Moreover, though Cinammon Nicole is perhaps the most publicly egregious example of Powerball puerility that took place over last weekend, she's certainly not the only one. I will admit to getting a little caught up in the mania myself. I'd purchased a couple of tickets when the jackpot was at $900 million, and since I had the correct Powerball in one of them, I parlayed my $4 winnings into two more tickets for the $1.5 billion drawing. The scene at my local Safeway was taken with Powerball mania. There was an unusually long line at the lottery ticket machine, and everyone was abuzz with lottery fever. It was, in a way, festive, but it was also, in a way, a little sad.
I should set some context. I live in a decent enough area of the D.C. suburbs, but Reston, VA, is intentionally economically mixed, so the Safeway in question services, in addition to my middle-class development, some lower income developments and a sizable project building. The demographics of lottery ticket buyers, by all appearances, came from the lower income neighborhoods.** While many of the ticket buyers I observed may not have been going quite to the extent of Cinnamon Nicole, there was all manner of what appeared to be foolish spending and illogical thinking. One lady, for instance, while waiting for the customer service person to process her handful of lottery slips -- what had to equate to $50 or more worth of tickets -- remarked that she didn't usually play the lottery, but when the jackpot got this big, she had to go in on it. I suppose this makes some sense on the face of it, and the critical reader here will no doubt recognize that I was doing the same thing, albeit to the tune of $4, but when you examine the statement, it makes no sense. Why is $1.5 billion so much more compelling than a very small jackpot, like, say $40 million. Presumably, the $20 million she would keep from the smaller jackpot would change her lifestyle no less drastically, yet she, and many others in her shoes, are apparently not willing to part with money they can't afford to lose for such pocket change. "No thank you. You can keep your tens of millions of dollars. But when it gets to a larger jackpot, which I am equally, if not more, unlikely to win, then I'm willing to part with half of next month's electric bill for a chance at the really big bucks." Something like this sentiment was echoed in a lot of Facebook comments I saw last week. It's a strange idea. If you're really putting your eggs in the lottery basket, why does it have to approach $1 billion to get you to play? You should be playing every week.
Of course, not everyone could afford to play every week at the rate that they were buying tickets ahead of the $1.5 billion jackpot. Most of the people in my Safeway weren't taking the conservative road I was, hedging their cash on a mere $4 bet. Most people that I could see were going whole hog. The man immediately in front of me shelled out no fewer than 3 photos of Andrew Jackson on lottery tickets. Apparently, the amount of money people are willing to fork over is proportional to the amount of the jackpot, which I guess makes sense, but, again, the smallest of Powerball jackpots would do the trick, and I would think that the increasing size of the jackpot shouldn't lure you into spending more money that you don't have on a chance to win. The $60 the man in front of me fed the machine looked like it would have purchased at least half a dozen pairs of shoes, assuming what he was wearing that evening was representative of his regular footwear.
I am loathe to tell anyone how to spend their money -- the clear critique of how my fellow Safeway shoppers were spending their money notwithstanding -- but what I saw in the last week or so in the run-up to the giant Powerball jackpot made me think that this lottery is making a whole bunch of people spend money they don't have on a very foolish hope. As I was driving away from the Safeway the night the jackpot was actually won, I got to thinking about the lottery as a form of taxation. And by the lottery as taxation, I don't mean the parts of the proceeds that go to education, environmental upkeep, etc. I mean the income taxes on winnings paid by the jackpot winners. According to Money Magazine, large jackpot winners will pay about 39.6% in federal income taxes. That's about $600 million. Another $40-80 million will go to state taxes. That's a lot of tax revenue the GOV is raising in revenue, and again, that's completely aside from any revenue that they take directly from the proceeds (which, if I read the ABC news article I referenced above correctly, amounts to about another $350 million, roughly speaking). And keep in mind that that tax revenue is not coming from the much maligned top 1%. Far from it, by my observation. I mean, those that are financially set are not blowing significant money on Powerball tickets. I bet Mark Zuckerberg bought zero. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of tickets are purchased by people of lower-middle class status or below, people who are hard-up and holding on to a pipe dream that the winning numbers will make it all better.
So what struck me, after thinking about this for a while, is that the lottery is like some sort of bizarro-world Bernie Sanders taxation scheme. Imagine if the effect of the lottery with regard to government revenue and who it was being taken from were announced as an actual tax program. Imagine the government saying, "We're going to amend some of our revenue difficulties by assessing another $1.85 billion in taxes. We're going to take this money randomly from the poorest Americans, but, here's the good news. We're going to kick about half of that $1.85 billion to between 1 and 3 of the taxpayers, selected at random, who pay into this special assessment. The more you pay in taxes, the better shot you have of winning the money, but your chances of winning anything of significance at all are less than 1 in a million." Because that's essentially what's happening, unless I'm misunderstanding something terribly. My guess is there would be something of a hue and cry if it were announced this way, and yet people can't part with their hard earned money fast enough when it's voluntary.
As I said, I don't mean any of this to tell anyone how to spend their money. Nor do I mean to get all moral about the lottery or gambling or any of that. I just find it odd that we get so drawn into something like the Powerball, so drawn in that we voluntarily tax ourselves at an alarming rate, and collectively do so in one of the most regressive tax structures the world has ever seen. I feel like we should be more clear-eyed about this as a society.
Then again, as Annie Savoy once said, "This world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness."***
**Before accusations of racism fly, let it be known that I was making this observation based entirely on what the buyers were wearing, particularly on their feet. I may, of course, have been incorrect in my estimation of the socio-economic classes of the various ticket buyers, but we all know that I wasn't.
***Annie Savoy is the female love interest in Bull Durham, played wonderfully by Susan Sarandon.
I'm not sure how I feel about people giving her $800. On one hand, there's the logic that says a Darwin Awards candidate like Cinnamon (or is Nicole her given name?) really should be out her life savings. What she did is a pretty stupid thing to do, and it doesn't bode well that in her GoFundMe plea, she gives evidence of not having even learned from her mistake: she pleads with would-be donors, "With your small donation of at least $1.00, a like and one share, I’m certain that we will be able to pick ourselves up from the trenches of this lost [sic] and spend another fortune trying to hit it big again!" Yes, she is apparently ready to do this again, so on one hand, I'm with Kenyatta Gibson, the GoFundMe user who wrote in response to her plea, “Guuuuuuuuuuurl…….I ‘SWEATERGAAAAAWD’ if I see one person give you one rusty copper penny I will spend ten times what you spent on lottery tickets on PLANE tickets to fly to their humble abode so spoiled in riches that they can afford to make it rain on Sweet Brown like ratchet humans such as you who choose to spend their cash on Remy, Flaming Hot Cheetos, VOSS Water and Powerball , and commence to kicking every single one of their asses!!!” (courtesy Dailywire).
On the other hand, it says something nice about the mercy we're still willing to have on each other that someone would subsidize Cinnamon Nicole's (I'll use both names just to be safe) chronic lack of wisdom.
Moreover, though Cinammon Nicole is perhaps the most publicly egregious example of Powerball puerility that took place over last weekend, she's certainly not the only one. I will admit to getting a little caught up in the mania myself. I'd purchased a couple of tickets when the jackpot was at $900 million, and since I had the correct Powerball in one of them, I parlayed my $4 winnings into two more tickets for the $1.5 billion drawing. The scene at my local Safeway was taken with Powerball mania. There was an unusually long line at the lottery ticket machine, and everyone was abuzz with lottery fever. It was, in a way, festive, but it was also, in a way, a little sad.
I should set some context. I live in a decent enough area of the D.C. suburbs, but Reston, VA, is intentionally economically mixed, so the Safeway in question services, in addition to my middle-class development, some lower income developments and a sizable project building. The demographics of lottery ticket buyers, by all appearances, came from the lower income neighborhoods.** While many of the ticket buyers I observed may not have been going quite to the extent of Cinnamon Nicole, there was all manner of what appeared to be foolish spending and illogical thinking. One lady, for instance, while waiting for the customer service person to process her handful of lottery slips -- what had to equate to $50 or more worth of tickets -- remarked that she didn't usually play the lottery, but when the jackpot got this big, she had to go in on it. I suppose this makes some sense on the face of it, and the critical reader here will no doubt recognize that I was doing the same thing, albeit to the tune of $4, but when you examine the statement, it makes no sense. Why is $1.5 billion so much more compelling than a very small jackpot, like, say $40 million. Presumably, the $20 million she would keep from the smaller jackpot would change her lifestyle no less drastically, yet she, and many others in her shoes, are apparently not willing to part with money they can't afford to lose for such pocket change. "No thank you. You can keep your tens of millions of dollars. But when it gets to a larger jackpot, which I am equally, if not more, unlikely to win, then I'm willing to part with half of next month's electric bill for a chance at the really big bucks." Something like this sentiment was echoed in a lot of Facebook comments I saw last week. It's a strange idea. If you're really putting your eggs in the lottery basket, why does it have to approach $1 billion to get you to play? You should be playing every week.
Of course, not everyone could afford to play every week at the rate that they were buying tickets ahead of the $1.5 billion jackpot. Most of the people in my Safeway weren't taking the conservative road I was, hedging their cash on a mere $4 bet. Most people that I could see were going whole hog. The man immediately in front of me shelled out no fewer than 3 photos of Andrew Jackson on lottery tickets. Apparently, the amount of money people are willing to fork over is proportional to the amount of the jackpot, which I guess makes sense, but, again, the smallest of Powerball jackpots would do the trick, and I would think that the increasing size of the jackpot shouldn't lure you into spending more money that you don't have on a chance to win. The $60 the man in front of me fed the machine looked like it would have purchased at least half a dozen pairs of shoes, assuming what he was wearing that evening was representative of his regular footwear.
I am loathe to tell anyone how to spend their money -- the clear critique of how my fellow Safeway shoppers were spending their money notwithstanding -- but what I saw in the last week or so in the run-up to the giant Powerball jackpot made me think that this lottery is making a whole bunch of people spend money they don't have on a very foolish hope. As I was driving away from the Safeway the night the jackpot was actually won, I got to thinking about the lottery as a form of taxation. And by the lottery as taxation, I don't mean the parts of the proceeds that go to education, environmental upkeep, etc. I mean the income taxes on winnings paid by the jackpot winners. According to Money Magazine, large jackpot winners will pay about 39.6% in federal income taxes. That's about $600 million. Another $40-80 million will go to state taxes. That's a lot of tax revenue the GOV is raising in revenue, and again, that's completely aside from any revenue that they take directly from the proceeds (which, if I read the ABC news article I referenced above correctly, amounts to about another $350 million, roughly speaking). And keep in mind that that tax revenue is not coming from the much maligned top 1%. Far from it, by my observation. I mean, those that are financially set are not blowing significant money on Powerball tickets. I bet Mark Zuckerberg bought zero. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of tickets are purchased by people of lower-middle class status or below, people who are hard-up and holding on to a pipe dream that the winning numbers will make it all better.
So what struck me, after thinking about this for a while, is that the lottery is like some sort of bizarro-world Bernie Sanders taxation scheme. Imagine if the effect of the lottery with regard to government revenue and who it was being taken from were announced as an actual tax program. Imagine the government saying, "We're going to amend some of our revenue difficulties by assessing another $1.85 billion in taxes. We're going to take this money randomly from the poorest Americans, but, here's the good news. We're going to kick about half of that $1.85 billion to between 1 and 3 of the taxpayers, selected at random, who pay into this special assessment. The more you pay in taxes, the better shot you have of winning the money, but your chances of winning anything of significance at all are less than 1 in a million." Because that's essentially what's happening, unless I'm misunderstanding something terribly. My guess is there would be something of a hue and cry if it were announced this way, and yet people can't part with their hard earned money fast enough when it's voluntary.
As I said, I don't mean any of this to tell anyone how to spend their money. Nor do I mean to get all moral about the lottery or gambling or any of that. I just find it odd that we get so drawn into something like the Powerball, so drawn in that we voluntarily tax ourselves at an alarming rate, and collectively do so in one of the most regressive tax structures the world has ever seen. I feel like we should be more clear-eyed about this as a society.
Then again, as Annie Savoy once said, "This world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness."***
**Before accusations of racism fly, let it be known that I was making this observation based entirely on what the buyers were wearing, particularly on their feet. I may, of course, have been incorrect in my estimation of the socio-economic classes of the various ticket buyers, but we all know that I wasn't.
***Annie Savoy is the female love interest in Bull Durham, played wonderfully by Susan Sarandon.
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