Monday, February 20, 2006
Lottery Foolishness
As I have mentioned before, when the national lotteries reach the 300 million mark or so, I buy a couple of tickets. That was the case this past weekend when it reached a record $365mm. Since Georgia does not have the PowerBall, you must go across the river and buy them in South Carolina. This undoubtedly increases the number of tickets sold over there since a lot of us from Georgia add to the activity. When you have a big prize like this, there are almost always long lines of people buying large numbers of tickets for several days. As I told my bride, if we wake up on Sunday morning and learn that the winning ticket was sold at the very filling station where we bought ours, the odds of us winning would still be prohibitive--tens and maybe hundreds of thousands to one. As they say, a tax on the stupid.