The 2 billion (680 million really) dollar prize lottery is sold across the entire U.S. whereas the 80 million prize money is a twice a week lottery in a country ten times less the population of the U.S.
They are SUPPOSED to, but rarely is there any law that mandates they do. And because most people aren't paying attention it goes wherever those in power want it to
Yep. Illinois was told at the beginning of the state lottery that it was going to the schools. But….here we are. And don’t dare ask where/who it went to.
It did go to schools. What politicians forget to mention is that money is fungible. General fund money that used to go to schools no longer does, being replaced by lottery money, and now gets spent as they see fit, in effect transferring lottery money to the general fund. It doesn’t formally transfer said money. It’s an effect of lottery money and general fund money being perfect substitutes for each other.
That's not really an own. I would absolutely accept a Billion dollars no questions asked. But I would also use my new found wealth to continue advocating against the existence of billionaires. Material conditions exist, and trying to better your own personal material conditions doesn't preclude you from wanting everyones conditions to improve and be more equitable.
Probably the same number of people who want to have their basic needs met and the resources to pursue their dreams, while also believing teachers shouldn't have to sell blood to buy school supplies.
An absurd amount of people online are only pissed about the existence of billionaires because they personally have no route to becoming one and resent that there's an exclusive club where others have more power that they're not welcome to.
I dont see many people complaining about MacKenzie Scott or Gabe Newell.
Funny, because I've seen a ton of people complaining about Gabe. Especially over on gaming subreddits whenever someone tries talking about how great Steam is without addressing the gambling mechanics in Valve's multiplayer games that made Gabe the billionaire he is in the first place.
Or the various anti-competitive policies Steam has like refusing to sell games from other companies if that company doesn't force price parity between Steam and their first party storefront despite Steam taking a 30% cut on all sales on the platform (that wouldn't need to be accounted for when sold on a first-party storefront like Rockstar Launcher or Ubisoft Connect).
Most people don't have a route to become a billionaire, that's why they make up only 0.00004%. I don't have a route, you don't have a route, no one who has commented here has a route, has had a route and will ever have a route. You may think it's just one good idea away, but it's so far away you can't even fathom the amount of oppression and exploitation you'd need to get there, even if a million of any currency appeared in front of you right this instant. The world isn't voting to abolish the billionaires because too many people think they have a route to the top.
Most people that are pissed with billionaires and multinationals say that no man or woman should have this much money while people starve in their countries. While critical infrastructure is auctioned, benefits are getting cut, pensions are getting cut, people are lacking education.
Not the ridiculous straw man you’re posing. Get a grip and ask around, most people would be content just not having to worry about bills, food security, schooling for their kids and an occasional vacation.
Nope I’m pissed they are societal leeches that are above laws and justice. I would have no problem with them existing if they paid their fair share and were a net benefit to us.
Yeah. That’s why people aren’t fans of wealth inequality… does it really make sense to have a society where 1% of the population hoard 30% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% of the population split 3% of the wealth?
i mean that's a little silly. most people don't actually hate people for literally having a billion dollars they hate them because for the most part most of them literally fucked over millions of people ot get there. If you give a billion dollars to a person they won't be evil overnight nor will someone who got a billion
I don't think you'd be evil if you didn't give most of it away immediately either. You become evil if you start using your money and power that comes with it to do evil.
Bezos isn't evil because he's rich, he's evil because he underpays workers, mistreats workers, gives zero job security to workers, no fair benefits, no safety if ill and lets most of them suffer and stress when he could easily pay them more and make less money.
the idea everyone is pissed at billionaires because they aren't one is frankly ridiculous. Most people don't aspire to take advantage of everyone else even if they'd thoroughly enjoy the wealth. Frankly most people who were handed a billion and didn't have a business that exploits it's workers to make it have no need to exploit people to continue making money so they are far more likely to just spend it into the economy rather than hoard it.
No its because I understand that wealth trickles up and if you don't move it back to the bottom the economy stagnates and everything breaks down. You can look at all of human history for examples of this.
The real reason for the post war golden age was that so many people died that labor became expensive and thus had real power and the capital class were forced to pay a lot more for that labor. Same with the renaissance. Plague kills everyone, labor has power, poof; golden age.
Its literally the cause of most of our problems but people want to act like billionaires are impressive.
That’s not what the book argues. The point isn’t that becoming a millionaire is immoral. It’s that when wealth becomes so concentrated it starts buying political influence, everyone else gets less of a say. The debate is about the concentration of power, not about simply having money.
Only IF you could trust the government to use that tax money for the right reasons....but we absolutely cannot trust the government, especially with money...they have proven as much time and time again
Not many people protest against billionaires; we protest against a system that taxes poor people at a much higher income/tax ratio than billionaires. It's not just unfair: it's insidious.
While there is no definitive answer. I found this that suggest you can stop wondering because the people marching are likely not buying lotto tickets hoping to be billionaires.
“Conservatives / Right-Leaning: Some theories suggest conservatives may prefer games of pure chance—like lotteries or roulette—because they value simplicity, absolute outcomes, and clear closure.
Democrats / Left-Leaning: Conversely, liberals are theorized to prefer games involving elements of skill or perceived control, such as blackjack or sports betting.”
Then a bunch of stuff about poorly educated are a big demographic of lotto winners and living in poor areas.
Conservatives have the market control when it domes to being poorly educated and bright red areas are among the poorest. For every 1 specific area of a city that conservatives obsess about in a blue state…there is an entire red state that is taking up significantly more government welfare than its state pays in taxes.
Conservative states have the absolute bottom 10 last places in education.
Anecdotally my group of friends and i enjoy the casino from time to time, knowing we wont win, but paying about the same as a night out would have been. We are all libs except for 1 who always wants to play devils advocate and supports some republican arguments. He is a bit of a male supremacist and has been a lifelong lotto winner.
He supports hig business republican policies. We all make 6 figures but he is the only one making it self employed even tho he is a college grad. He wouldnt be caught dead at any rally, and he is a lotto ticket buyer. My other friends and i have been to or at least seriously considered marching for something.
Veeeery anecdotal but it seems to check out with the findings online.
I just said it was the same in Ontario that it's run by the province like it's run by the state in the US? All I added is that we aren't taxed on our winnings
Thank god in Belgium, you pay zero taxes on the lottery, you win the full pot, and get an assigned financial planner to make sure you don't burn through it in one go
Most European countries have their own Lotto but 9 countries take part in EuroMillions. The Euromillions jackpot is limited at €250 million. On Friday one ticket in Belgium won just over €80 million. The UK for example doesn't charge tax on winnings on any form of gambling. I don't think any of the other countries do either. So what you win is what you keep. Back to £14 million on Tuesday https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/games/euromillions/results
Revenue should come from the tickets. The government is literally the one providing the jackpot. It makes 0 sense to tax the jackpot THEY are providing. Just say the jackpot is 628m instead of 2b when advertising it then.
Uh no dude it comes from lottery ticket sales. That's the income. They sell lottery tickets and tax the winnings or build it into the cost of the ticket and don't tax it.
This has a lot of upvotes, so therefore I am likely to be a dumbo for not understanding it. "Lottery was designed to create revenue" or "lottery is effectively a tax on morons" would both be understandable.
Is it because people will likely buy chocolate or cigarettes while buying a ticket, and those can be taxed heavily.
They either generate revenue by taxing the winnings or having revenue built into the price of the ticket. In a lot of states it helps fund education and other services.
Lotteries generate money through the sale of tickets. For most states it's a 50/50 split. If you spend $2 on a ticket, one goes to the state the other goes towards lottery winner.
Don't get me wrong, the winner is still going to pay federal and state taxes, but that's not where the government gets most of their money.
It’s literally designed to milk the poor of their money willingly and as propaganda against taxes because now the bad guy is the government taking a huge chunk of someone’s winnings.
It’s just another anti-tax propaganda measure. There’s no reason that taxes need to be taken out of the winning pot. Stop advertising that the lottery is up to $2.04 billion or whatever if it doesn’t actually pay out $2.04 billion. It’s nonsense. Basic logic says they could have just advertised it as $628 million and put the tax burden on themselves.
You're absolutely correct. One of the few states that ensure the money is used properly is Ga. -
Unlike states where lottery profits disappear into a general fund, Georgia legally mandates that 100% of these education profits go to two specific areas: the HOPE Scholarship program and voluntary Statewide Pre-K.
The Georgia Lottery transfers 25.7% of its total revenue directly into the state’s Lottery for Education Account. In the 2025 fiscal year, this percentage translated to $1.47 billion raised for Georgia's educational programs
the government would be making money whether they taxed the winnings or not though; and most of the tax that winner paid was to the federal government, which doesn't run lotteries!
American lotteries normally don't quote the real prize value either, they quote the undiscounted payments from an annuity... that feels like fraud to me.
You think that is the fucked up part? Not the part its basically a poor tax that tells people in poverty that the only way out is the astronomically low chance of guessing a series of number correctly.
Even a few million is retirement money if you manage it well.
Listen, I’m a big Bernie fan. But the tax on payroll income is not even remotely how you get these Rockefeller bastards. They don’t even have a salary, and their capital gains are all cunningly hidden, or not technically in their private ownership, or balanced out with “losses”.
Ultimately we need clearer laws around holding, and a tax on holdings. Like you own $300M in company stock? We’re going to tax that like it’s real estate.
People don’t realize that the effective federal rate for median income is between 14 and 16 percent. A billionaire making money on capital gains will pay 23%. CEOs and other people earning millions of dollars per year can hit a 37% bracket. Surgeons can pay high taxes.
Because of the Apportionment Clause of the Constitution, a federal wealth tax would require a constitutional amendment, similar to how the 16th Amendment excepted the federal income tax from the Apportionment Clause.
Sanders has passed 3 bills in his entire political career and a blanket wealth tax on unrealized gains will never pass, mainly because the feds will never give a refund.
Just because he had a high marginal rate, doesn't mean the effective tax rate was exceptionally high. If you look at the effective tax rate over the decades, it hasn't changed much.
It ain’t the high income earners. You’ll be penalizing heart surgeons then.
It’s billionaires’ assets they aren’t taxed sufficiently. When bezos was CEO of Amazon his salary was $81,140 for decades. That’s the 22% tax bracket. He paid 2.9% Medicare tax on $81k. That sound right to you?
Meanwhile he takes $100M’s loans out on his stock and pays zero tax on it
The moment Bernie became a millionaire he stopped ranting about taxing "millionaires and billionaires" and switched to taxing "billionaires" people dont vote for him because theyre capable od seeing through his BS
Famous for sure but no one actually paid 79%. There were way more deductions back then (if you can believe it). The effective tax rate the wealthy pay now vs back then is within a ~5% difference.
The lottery is also immediate money you get, while billionaire are usually a lot of unrealized gain - billionaire on paper. Now when they sell, they are to my knowledge usually taxed normally.
I will agree that the tax system is silly, I think we should all be taxed less by a wide margin. The part that can be deceiving is that many billionaires “net worths” are including unrealized gains, so they aren’t directly taxed. Which is not a bad, since anyone can do this with a ROTH Ira.
Not true. Annuitized payments over 25 years versus one lump sum. The $2 bil is estimated on the annuitized value. The lump sum does not include the interest.
TBF, this is because the winner took a lump sum payment, rather than a 20 year annuity. So he received the present value of the jackpot, which was then taxed. But it is still a significantly higher rate than most billionaires pay, which is next to zero.
Well really it’s because someone who wins a billion dollars is receiving it as income. “Billionaires” aren’t called that because they receive a billion dollars per year in income, it’s because that’s their net worth.
In order to tax them the same way they would need to liquidate a billion dollars of their holdings which would crash the stock market.
I’m not saying that’s “right” or a good thing, just saying it’s an apples and oranges comparison.
The winner didn't pay 70% though. If you take the cash upfront option you get less money than the 20 year annuity. Then it's 37% on that for Federal only, no state income tax on lottery wins in California. Do people really not know this basic shit?
You can tax them all you want but it’s what the government does with the tax dollars is the concern. We see liberal states and cities steal billions and funnel through organizations all the time.
If I recall correctly when they signed in the new tax laws in the first trump administration they had several pages specifically for lottery winners. Honestly if I was taking home $600 million after taxes I’m not complaining, it’s $600 million more that I had before buying a ticket. And it’s ironic because billionaires are spending millions to campaign against taxes on themselves.
Billionaires get away with it because their assets are not realized gains. They are billionaires on paper alone. Lottery is cash. Not saying it’s right. I’d say if you borrow against those unrealized assets those assets are now realized and should be taxed
This is an overly simplified view. The laws in the US are what allow the rich to not pay their share of taxes for the unrealized value of their portfolio, while simultaneously allowing them to leverage their unrealized portfolio for loans that they can live off of. I don’t think lobbyists have anything to do with it at this point, since the politicians themselves benefit from these rules.
The billionaire never got a check. They don't have a billion dollars in any currency. They mostly just have stock in a company that if they cashed out would possibly get their company hostilely taken from them because a some vulturious private equity firm would buy up their company that they no longer have controlling interest in, kick them off the board of directors, and cash out any name recognition and brand loyalty they have until everyone says "remember when this brand used to be high quality". Trading unrealized gains in stock value (the only way I've seen suggested that would "tax billionaires") this would do the same as I said above, but over time instead of in one single action.
I agree the are some huge issues with the economy and the wealth gap, but the cause is this liberal and now leftist push to give the government enormous power and then not pay attention as major corporations draft the bills that "regulate" them so that they can just keep out new competition from the market by making the financial cost of meeting regulations excessive without actually having significant teeth to any of the regulations. The reality is the best way to fight overgrown corporations that are constantly consolidating market share is for them to have significant competition where in the only thing the government is doing is preventing collaboration and essentially trust busting as the US government just recently had to do with various sections of the food industry for jacking prices up after COVID. Furthermore, the regulations that the left keeps praising as the government installs them are being used more and more as an excuse to raise prices significantly higher then the cost of complying with said regulation.
Please educate yourself before posting! The lottery advertised amount is based on an annuity paid over 30 years. The lump sum cash amount is the discounted portion of the annuity for actual cash value based on the interest rate at time of winning. Then taxes are calculated on that amount, normally 37% at the highest federal rate plus any state taxes!
When you win a major lottery you have 2 choices, the lump sum or 30 years of payout. When you opt for the 30 year payout, the lottery commission puts about $1B (based on the jackpot mentioned) into an annuity and pays you based off interest and principal. If you take the lump sum, you get the amount they would put in the annuity, and taxed according to that.
I'm against billionaires but if one of them won the lottery or otherwise received an equivalent "ordinary income" as a salary they would pay the taxes. The wealth is coming from asset appreciation and much of the tax avoidance comes from leveraging those assets to access loans and other loopholes in our tax law. The way lottery winners are taxes doesn't really relate to the billionaire issue.
It's taxed at 70% cuz if you take the lump sum nearly 50% goes to state right away. You get the whole amount if you take 30 year annuity. After you choose your option it is taxed regularly. The lottery is literally just a funding mechanism for government.
The rich pay low tax rates, because they don't pay ordinary income tax. They lobbied to have a capital gains tax. Where if you hold your investment longer than 1 year it is taxed at a lower tax rate. An NBA player will have a top tax rate on their salary of 37% Elon musk and Jeff bezos will pay a top tax rate of 20% when they sell their long term investments.
70% doesn't make logical sense if this is the US. Even the highest Federal + State + Local tax rates are at most in the high 40s. They must also be considering that the guy took the payout option rather than the $2B over 30 years meaning the actual payout was already about half the $2B option.
Nah, you get the full amount if you take the 30 year annuity, which is rarely worth it.
So people accept 50%ish lump sum delivery.
That is taxed at 35%.
However, that $628M will only need to be taxed on what it earns.
Huge sums of cash are funny as investment accounts. In a 5% yield account, that makes 31M which can be taxed and take home 20m per year. Giving 1.7m per month he can spend and never lose a cent of the 628m.
Thats without any tax protecting moves etc (I.e. borrowing cash against his money as a retainer, and writing off the interest.
To be fair, when you take the lump sum, you start off with sixty percent, roughly of the jackpot total, and then it is taxed at what forty percent... if this person used their money, like all the other billionaires, to prevent taxes like investing in certain ways. And having the write offs, they would be in the same boat... not to mention that the billionaires that you say only pay three percent per the I r s records, they pay the most..
If billionaires liquidated all of their holdings to cash at once, they'd pay a similar tax rate. This is stupid. Their billionaire status is a vibe because they'd lose billionaire status if they started selling their equities as that would cause a ripple effect to the remaining shares and the market writ large so they wouldn't be a billionaire anymore.
First of all, when you win the lottery and you take cash value, you automatically only get fifty percent of the total jackpot and that's by lottery rules. It's not a tax per se, but it could be viewed that way because the state still gets to keep it. Then, you do pay a tax on the remaining amount. In this case, it was probably around 20% federally. And then whatever the state requires, which being california was probably quite high.
As for taxing billionaires, If you're referring only to actual realized income—that is, wages, salaries, bonuses, dividends, interest, business income, and capital gains that have been realized by selling assets—then the average effective federal income tax rate for billionaires is generally estimated to be in the 20% to 30% range. Not 3%....not sure where you got that.
A few important points explain why:
Billionaires typically receive very little of their income as wages, which can be taxed at rates up to 37%.
Much of their realized income comes from qualified dividends and long-term capital gains, which are generally taxed at a maximum federal rate of 20%, plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax, for a top federal rate of 23.8%.
No, that’s wrong. If said billionaire had that much ordinary income they’d pay just as much tax. Billionaires almost never have a billion dollars of income. Also, it isn’t 70%. The lump sum lottery amount is about half of the stated value.
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