Lottery winnings - a repost

(The recent large lottery prizes prompt me to post this entry from June of 2015 again.)

Yes, the state run numbers game, aka the lottery, is with us for good or bad, but I do question the way prizes are distributed.

From time to time I see posted in store windows the top prize that will be awarded to a winning ticket; this sum sometimes exceeds $200 million.  Now consider who are the purchasers of lottery tickets: the poor, the indebted, the desperate.  How much would it take for them to get their lives back on track?  I would suggest a lot less than $200 million, and I also ask myself: just what is the average lottery ticket purchaser going to do with that much money?

It would make more sense to split the large prizes into a number of smaller amounts that would be enough to turn people's lives around (pay off debts, buy a house, get some job training, put kids through college), but not so huge a sum as to be overwhelming.  Say twenty $10 million prizes instead of one large prize.  So instead of the size of the prize going up week by week as there are no winning tickets, the number of prizes (with new sets of winning numbers) would go up.  Having a larger number of prizes increases the chance of picking a winning number combination, so we could have more winners, and so more people whose lives could be improved.

The Democrats Fail Once More

The Democrats have once more showed their massive incompetence at messaging in the face of the Republicans' passing of the irresponsible tax cut bill.

How hard would it have been to have a unified message something along the following lines?

The Republicans are offering you a little extra spending money by adding $1.5 trillion to our national debt. Think of it like credit card debt.  In your private finances, would you run up your credit card just to give yourself a little extra spending money?  Surely not. So why would you want us to run up the national credit card that way? Especially as most of the extra debt is money going to wealthy people who surely don't need millions more in their pockets.

Responsible people who've had to temporarily live on credit start to pay down their balance once they have regular employment and a steady income. They don't keep running up their debt for extra spending money. 

That's what we should be doing as a country now the economy has recovered. We should be acting responsibly. Those with more than enough money should be contributing part of their large incomes to start paying down our national credit card, not be adding huge sums to it, leaving someone else is to pay the bloated balance sometime in the future.

(Not to mention the fact that the cuts for middle income people will turn into tax increases in just a few years.)

It's really not that hard to put out a message to counteract the Republicans' dishonest rhetoric.  It's shameful that the Democrats won't even try.