You have to play to win!

The motto of the Lottery is simple: You have to play to win.

It is flawless in its logic, because you can’t win if you do not have a ticket. I have a ticket. I have several, in fact. The wife and I have a few, and I chipped in $5 to the office pool. I mean, it’s (as of this writing) a $640,000,000 jackpot. As a former math junkie – Okay, fine, not really former, I just hide it better these days – I know that the odd of willing are hilariously small. 1 in 175,711,536 to be exact. However, the entertainment value really can’t be beat.

See, for the low price of a single dollar, you can daydream about how you would spend your winnings (a $462 million payout if you take the lump sum, and you should, because winnings are non-transferable, so if you take the annuity and then die, your family gets nothing). You can share your dreams with other people and plan out how you are going to get the life you want – the life you deserve – if you manage to be holding on to the winning pick. Just in the last three days (including today), that single dollar (okay, $10) has given me at least a dozen hours of joy. Day dreams and fantasies, all with just the remotest of chances of becoming real.

By comparison, it costs $10 or more to see a movie and be entertained for a couple of hours, maybe more if your friends also see the movie and you talk about it, but really, how many movies are worth spending lots of time talking about it? Usually it’s just 2 hours and done.

“Couldn’t you daydream without spending the dollar though?” It’s the question lots of people pose when they object to the Lottery. “It’s a tax on stupid people and poor people.” they might say, or some other way to degrade the people who buy a ticket. And they are right. You can daydream without buying a ticket. Daydreams are free. But the one thing you can’t do without a ticket: win. If you don’t spend the dollar, your daydreams are just daydreams and nothing more, but for the cost of just $1 those daydreams become potential plans.

What are my dreams? What would I do if I won? Well, a lot. I mean, even if the government took half in taxes you’re still talking about $231 million. All at once. If you put it in the bank at just 1% interest, you’d earn $2.3 million a year. That’s a lot of money. But I have tickets, so I have plans. I have lots of plans…