People lined up out the door Friday in mass numbers to pay a completely optional tax. On top of that, they're paying this money out after all their normal tax dollars have been taken out of their checks and salaries.
What kind of insane group of people would happily run to pay something they normally despise?
Lotto players are just that group, and their story is one that digs deep into American history.
Building on an English government tradition of using lotteries to entice people into coughing up their cash, our founding fathers used them to support our burgeoning nation.
In fact, much of George Washington's early success can be traced back to the raffles that offered up such fabulous prizes as silver coins, dinnerware, and even slaves. America probably wouldn't have had the money to fight the British Empire had it not been for the lotto.
Those times can't be perfectly compared to now, however, because in those days the idea of using taxes to fund public works was not exactly popular.
Now the lottery has moved into a new niche. Some suggest that it's a tax on stupidity and not understanding math. After all, the numbers really don't lie. The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are around one in 175,711,536.
To put it in simpler terms, if you were to buy five tickets a week it would take on average over 600,000 years to win. An individual player will probably be dead after the first hundred or so.
The amount of money spent just for this Friday's drawing was an obscene $1.46 billion, and it's a sad idea to think about what that money could have been used for had it been given away to charity.
Yet what we all should remember is that this is simple entertainment, and should be treated just like any other form of entertainment.
Nobody complains about how much people spend on going to the movies or a candy bar, but when people want to entertain themselves with a cheap thrill of possibly winning more money than feasibly spendable, it's suddenly a problem.
And if you think movies at least have artistic value, I have two words for you: Michael Bay.
Of course, it's not smart to spend your money every day on the lotto. Many of us have witnessed the old lady buying $50 worth of scratch-off tickets hoping to score that big money, or the hard working factory worker who spends a wad of cash earned by blood and sweat on a fistful of lotto tickets.
It's important to remember that the excitement of that win comes on their backs. In the end, it's those people that end up making lotteries a success for governments.
We should also take a step back and ask why the state would even engage in this and still think it has the moral high ground to uphold a ban on gambling. Maybe New York is quietly telling us that it won't legalize gambling because it wants people to gamble on the lotteries.
Whatever you think, how you have fun is your business. If you get a rush out of watching those balls pop up thinking of how much cool junk you would buy and how your debt would be gone if you could just win, that's your prerogative. Just know that, with 99.9999999 percent certainty, you're not going to win the jackpot.
