I know how to solve the financial crisis in this country.
Hire Rebecca Paul.
No, really.
Okay, for those of you who don’t know who Rebecca Paul is, she started up the Illinois Lottery. Then was hired away by Florida to start up the Florida Lottery. Then Georgia hired her away to start … you guessed it … the Georgia Lottery. Then Tennessee came calling, and hired her to start up the Tennessee Lottery.
She used to be a Republican, then her husband died, and she hooked up with a Democrat in the Tennessee state legislature. So I guess she’s a Democrat now.
Sort of like Theresa Heinz Kerry. Except Rebecca Paul actually did something.
Anyway, hire her away from Tennessee to start up the United States Lottery.
Run it like the lotteries she’s set up in Illinois, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. That means that half the money goes into the winner’s pot, 15% is used to run the lottery, and the other 35% goes to the treasury.
And lots of money will go into the lottery. Poor people put big bucks into the lottery all the time. So that’ll mean that Obama won’t need to raise taxes on the rich. Or on plumbers from Ohio.
And conservatives like me will get to watch poor people funding the government.
Sure, babies will go hungry, and crack dealers might find a crimp in their business, but that’s the price of success.
And the best part?
When some poor person wins and becomes a zillionaire, he’ll end up in a higher tax bracket and learn to hate Democrats.
There’ll be more rich Republicans (not rich White Republicans, but we’ve got enough of those already). And the poor Democrats will pay for it.
It’s a win-win situation.
The federal one would need some sort of incentive to be used over the state system.
What exactly, I have no idea.
[Easy. Bigger payoff. 50 states vs 12 states. Same reason MegaMillions gets more participation than, say, Illinois Lotto. This week, for example, MegaMillions is $51M while Illinois Lotto is like $3M. – B]
How often would we have drawings? Once a week, on Sunday evenings. Maybe then the pews would be full every Sunday morning?
Having lived with a father who couldn’t figure odds, I can say that the chance of winning alone will be enough of an incentive. Remember, “You can’t win if you don’t play!”
I’m a white Republican. Why don’t you want me to be rich, too?
I say just give them the money cuz we all know they’ll just go right down to the liqueur store and buy 2,456,836 more tickets .
They don’t get the whole thing after repayment for 30 years of welfare comes off the top and that will piss them off so their incentive to try and win again with no reparations will be huuuge.
(remember, what’s her name in Ohio claims that people who suddenly become rich/famous are fair game. When you’re white and work for a living, just saying you’d like to be rich
will trigger a full scale invasion of your life.)
You’d also need KENO-USA machines in all the bars. The odds of winning that are even worse than MegaMillions but try explaining that to a drunk stupid person.
Instead of sending checks to people who don’t work, you can just send them coupons to buy lottery tickets, when they complain they don’t get enough, you can tell them there’s a whole
shit load of lottery tickets, buried in that crappy street that just happens to need a new water pipe. Since you avoid calling it work, they’ll be more than willing to go and dig.
That’s actually not a bad idea at all.
I like it!
Isn’t that like some sort of “idiot tax”?
[Yes. And one they’d pay gladly. – B]
Yup. It’s a tax on people who are bad at math. Which means that the Democrats will get hit at least 3:1 for the Republicans, Independents and Libertarians. But, on the other hand, as shown in Texas, the Democrats are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about lotteries, so since Obama is taking over, this idea’s time has come! Plus, Lotteries are very popular in former socialist nations – The Ukrainian visa lottery is how my buddy Anton got to come to the US (congratulations on taking the oath of citizenship, Anton). They have more people playing than you would believe.
Shame about the crack dealers, though. Maybe we could arrange some kind of subsidy, or maybe an education program. We could move them to Chicago, so they could learn about social activism, like William Balfour?
As my economics professor said in college, “The lottery is a tax on the stupid”.
BTW, Obama marks a return to Keynesian economics. That same professor said in his first lecture to our class, “Modern economic policy was thought up by a man named Kaynes… Dead!…. Good!….”
This professor passed away some years ago, which is a deep pity on a number of levels. If he were alive and as angry today as he was 20 years ago, I think he’d be a youtube sensation for today’s conservatives. And for alumni like myself who miss hearing his humorous tirades three times a week, complete with graphs explaining the math on why he was right.
If this were to be implimented, I want to start a pool on how soon the government/administrative share starts to go up and the prize pool share down.
The only real problem is the impact on the children, having worked with outreach to the children of the persistantly poor, the wants of the parents almost always comes before the needs of the kids.
Cable/Satellite dish- check
Big Screen TV – Check
Lottery “investment” – Check
Ciggarettes/Booze/Meth – Heck yeah
Nutritious Food (heck any food) for the kids – Not so much
Coat of 4 year old in snow storm – No
But I came not to poop on your idea, but to propose a small tweek that would improve it.
Instead of one big prize, we have lots of prizes so that almost everyone who enters wins!
And instead of Rebecca Paul, we get Shirley Jackson* to run it.
That way the rest of us win as well.
*sorry could not get link working reference at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery for the literary impaired
Shorter version of the post I think got eaten:
If set up the national lottery to make lots of winners rather than a few big winners and got Shirley Jackson to run it instead of Rebbeca Paul, then we would all be winners wether we entered The Lottery or not.
All can be solved by taxing the crap out of strippers. They are responsible for taking money of the the hands of the desperate, those that exercise poor judgment, and quite a few lesbians.