You know what bothers me? "Taxes on Lottery Winnings"
1Not the concept itself, but the common complaint. You’re upset you have to pay taxes on free money? It’s free money!
“The billion dollar jackpot as a lumpsum is $750m and after tax more like $500m. Can you believe it?”
I can’t believe you’re imagining more money than you’ll ever earn in a lifetime and still complaining about it. If I find $20 in my jacket pocket it makes my day.
I know I’m making an unpopular argument, and I know people feel strongly about this. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll take any post - tax winnings off your hands no matter how small. Just don’t send it over Venmo the IRS watches that now.
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Well one thing comes of it, those Wayward parents, the one that have NOT to fair share Child support & been trying to stall, skip or somehow delay paying what is due, gets to pay all their back support all at once! That is a very good thing.
I have a couple of contradictory opinions on lotteries and those who play them. On the one hand, whomever it was that said they’re a tax on people who are bad at math kind of had a point. On the other hand, I have a hobby that I spend money on with zero chance of getting it back so maybe I’m actually worse off than someone who chooses to spend their disposable income on lottery tickets.
Awhile back my state was sending out vouchers for free lottery tickets, I guess to every address in the book because they showed up at my house and workplace. Since I was the one that brought in the mail at the workplace I kept those and used them as well as the ones that came to the house. One of those free tickets won $3, which I kept in spite of the clerk’s suggestion that I get another ticket with it. I’m now the only person I know that’s money ahead on the lottery.
Playing the lottery is just putting a match to your money. I am not rich enough to do that. They hook you by intermittent reinforcement (free tickets as 99.999999999999% of the time they are losers too). Research documents that when you reward someone infrequently and unexpectedly or they know of someone who had a reward the behavior is harder to extinguish. Yea! You have just been sucked in to pay taxes week by week in small increments.
@Kidsandliz Hmmm …
/giphy rat pulling lever
@Kidsandliz sigh, not what I wanted …
/showme Gambling rat pulling lever continuously to get snack once ever 20 times randomly
@cfg83 Here’s the image you requested for “Gambling rat pulling lever continuously to get snack once ever 20 times randomly”
@mediocrebot That’s more like it.
You can’t have a lot of money to improve your lot in life.
Unless it was a metric ton of money.
Learned that after making five figures from short term gains and getting a digit taxed off. I should have kept going to six figures; would have been a lot less annoyed at losing a digit there (because I’d still be in a new tax bracket).
@pakopako Ah, the burden of wealth…
@pakopako I don’t know. When I started making 6 figures and paying in the extra taxes on those it was pretty annoying to me to have pay in so much extra. I pay in an extra $400 per paycheck and still fell short enough this tax season I had to pay an extra “under payment penalty” (basically the government saying that I didn’t let them earn enough interest off my money over the year so they charged me for it… because I never didn’t pay in and I shored up what I owed before April 15).
@phendrick
This is why the complaint bothers me. The “catch” to the lottery is so incredibly obvious that it’s infuriating to see someone point out income tax like it’s some secret thing.
I’ve never bought a lottery ticket or played any gambling “games”.
)
(I can do math…
@macromeh Ha! You will laugh at this. The wife of a retired plumber who was spending $400 month on lottery tickets, back when the days when that state lottery the odds of winning were 1 in 7.1M asked me to help get her husband not to blow through their retirement income
Anyway using an assumption that you can’t do, but had to to do math since otherwise you cant (eg that a different combination of numbers won each time), I worked out if you bought tickets for each drawing (so twice a week) if he bought one ticket for each drawing it could take over 62,000 years for him to win (I forget the exact amount as this was years and years ago) or if he wanted to win win 20 years he had to spend over $7K each week.
He then told me that if you feel lucky then that changes the odds.
I then suggested to his wife that she that she take all the money she could get her hands on and lock it in her name and separate their finances.
There are better ways of doing and taxing lotteries that are more rewarding for small communities, where impact is felt. Imagine town collecting taxes, randomly paying out a resident.