Goat Day 18 - Lottery
9
A corner store I shop at regularly recently sold a $1,000,000 winning ticket, and a clipping from a local newspaper with a story about it was hung in the store. I found a copy of the newspaper, and in addition to the winning ticket sale, there was an article about lottery revenue and a breakdown of where the money goes. According to the article, for every dollar the lottery takes in, 64 cents is paid out to winners, 6.5 cents pays commissions to ticket sellers, 4.5 cents goes to the lottery operations and 25 cents goes in to a fund for public schools. I think that’s pretty interesting.
Also, the newspaper clipping persuaded me to buy $10 worth of scratch off tickets, and I won $26 (I think - some of these games are complex.) Awesome!
/image Pomeranian lottery
- 5 comments, 6 replies
- Comment
VAN GOGH! MANGO! TANGO! AWESOME!
Yay for being up $16. Time to invest in a catshirt!
And for every dollar the lottery kicks in to the education fund, the assholes in the legislature you voted for, rob the children to put it back into their general slush fund. So the kids still get screwed by the politicians in the end.
State lotteries are a con, and always were a con. And the voting rubes fell for it. Fix it by voting.
@mike808 Yup. Maryland in the last election had a question about that.
Lottery and casino monies went into a general education fund. That fund could then be “dipped” into by lawmakers. 89% of voters voted that those monies would go into another fund - one that could not be dipped into. I am sure there is a loophole for lawmakers somewhere in the wording.
@mfladd The way it works is they reduce the funding from the general budget for state education, which naturally frees it up to be spent elsewhere. The net is that schools and universities don’t get any “extra” money, they get the same as they had before. And when the lottery income goes down, it creates a shortfall in the education systems across the state. It is a failure of governance. Voting matters. Vote the bums out.
@mike808 Not only that, but according to the figures I saw, the lottery itself got at least $140 million for operations last year. That seems like a lot, but IDK.
@mfladd @mike808
@mike808 calls it.
They use the lottery “educational funds” as an excuse to short the schools within funding bills disbursing other state revenue.
And they stop finding state college and universities, because students can always borrow themselves into future bankruptcy.
Meanwhile the is no shortage of funds for public/private “partnerships” where the “private” end of things gets almost all the benefits.
When the Chinese have all the leading tech (stolen, or engineered there) (which is likely to happen quite quickly), I’ll have to remember to send a thank you note to my state leg.
@f00l @mfladd
You can “thank” them by voting for an opponent that shares your views. Don’t silence your vote by not voting. Your silence is agreement!
Disenfranchising voters is precisely what election fraudsters are all about. It is not about getting a majority to the polls to vote for you, it is about keeping a majority of voters who will elect someone else away from the polls (by any means necessary) and preventing them from exercising that right.
Just look at North Carolina as the poster child for this. Harris should be disqualified and barred from running for federal office in the future.
@mfladd @mike808
Yeah. I vote.
Right now the local legislator seems to listen only to corp interests. : (
just have the cashier scan it for a win if you want to avoid the weird acrylic resin concealer bits getting everywhere.
I’ve never bought a lottery ticket, but I went to a company party last weekend and among the various prizes, they gave everyone a couple of scratch-off tickets. One was a bust and the other one paid a whopping $2. Woo hoo! Now I can get that pack of gum I’ve been wanting!