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I pay my Math Tax all the time. (Score:5, Informative)
I fully understand that I have no chance of winning. I don't really care. A good portion of the cash goes towards the woefully underfunded public school system in my state, I consider it a fun idle activity to occasionally check winning numbers and to complain about never winning, and the $1 every so often is utterly inconsequential to me.
Some people have problems buying huge numbers of tickets, and that's a gambling problem, but it's absurd to seriously call it a math tax. Nobody buys tickets expecting to win.
The Emperor agrees with almost everything you say. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, it could be worse. The amount spent on US elections this season has eclipsed the total spending on ALL science, research and development by the US government.
At most a few hundred million dollars have been spent this campaign seasons. This is an absurd amount of money, but it's not even a fraction of NASA's $18.5 billion 2011 budget. NASA spending represents only a fraction of US science investment.
Re:I pay my Math Tax all the time. (Score:3, Informative)
Second, the lotteries result in a cut in school funding. 10% (made up number) of the general fund went to education. Then they started the lottery and "dedicated" it to education. Then cut general fund spending to 0% of the general fund (spending instead on hookers for the governor or whatever). So, education doesn't get any more money than before, but actually gets less because the voters (worse at math than the lottery players) never asked about absolute funding, and were happy to see a smaller amount "dedicated" to education than dumping the lottery into the general fund and increasing education funding.
Re:Ugh. (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. I'm not stupid. It's just fun to be able to daydream "what if I win?"
Here in the UK we have Premium Bonds for that (Government savings bonds with a monthly lottery in lieu of interest, and enough smaller prizes to provide some return if you leave money in long-term): instead of buying the dream with real money, you buy the dream with the hypothetical extra interest you could have earned if you had invested the money elsewhere. Not the best investment, although if you compare apples with apples (risk, ease of access, tax status, actual chance of you continually moving money around to get decent rates) and you've used up your other tax-free allowances you could do worse.
The national lottery gets better publicity, though. The Government would rather have poor people giving them money for free than slightly better-off people lending them money at low interest.
Re:Ugh. (Score:4, Informative)
Now you've gotten me curious. Do the many small prizes actually give you a steady rate or return, or is it more like a random noise that just slightly tilted in your favor? In other words, could you actually lose money in the long term in these things?
Basically, each £1 bond has a 1:24000 chance of winning a prize each month. The vast majority of the prizes are £25. So, if you buy £24,000 worth you'll get a pretty consistent £25 per month tax free return (nothing one month, £50 the next, etc...) If you do get one of the slightly better prizes, that will put you ahead of the game for a while (I've had one £100 win). Obviously, the less you put in the longer you'll have to leave it in to be sure of getting that rate of return.
You can't lose money in the "game over - insert coin" sense - you can always get all of your stake back on demand and its government-backed (did we lose our AAA rating yet?). You can "lose" in the sense that your rate of return is likely to be less than the rate of inflation - but the same is currently true of most no-risk/no access restrictions savings accounts, once you factor in the tax rates on savings interest, especially if you can't be arsed to move your money around all the time to get the "special introductory rates". They're mainly of interest if you're on the 40% tax rate and have used up your other tax-free savings allowances.
The other advantage over the lottery is that the jackpot is a sensible £1M, which I think I could deal with without ending up face down in a heart-shaped swimming pool surrounded by empty coke wrappers.
Re:Ugh. (Score:4, Informative)
Frankly a lottery is one of the cheapest things you can throw your money away at. Just start picking apart any enjoyment you buy and think how much you spend in a year and the fact that there is zero return on investment. At least a lottery has a >0 ROI.
You need to look up ROI because it doesn't mean what you think it means. Lotteries have a 0 ROI.
If a lottery has 80% payback, the gains on a $1.00 bet is $0.80.
The ROI is then (0.80 - 1.00) / 1.00 = -0.20
Americans households spend an average of $540 a year on lotteries alone, not counting other forms of gambling. That's not what I call "cheap", and several times what they spend at e.g. the movies.