A lucky person who bought a ticket in Arkansas will take home a whopping $1.817 billion Powerball jackpot, which has a cash option of $834.9 million.
The Christmas Eve prize is the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won and the largest Powerball prize this year, according to a news release from the Multi-State Lottery Association.
I didn’t actually go do the math on it, looks like it’s accurately 37% to 50% (or thereabouts), I saw several EU countries listed around 53%-57%, so it can be pretty measurable, I guess.
In Europe, the taxes are taken out of the game, not out of the prices. So the lottery pays out only half of the money taken in, but at least the cash price amounts are honest numbers.
Looks like Americans like to be pulled over in slices:
Restaurant food, the menu lists prices, but you basically have to add the servers pay on top.
Shopping, the price tags list product prices, but you have to add a number of taxes on top of it.
Taxation, taxes are low, but you have to pay for a lot of things like health care and education through the nose.
I always find it interesting how many Americans cannot figure out the simple maths. Your gouvernement has about the same bills (infrastructure, education, the government itself, military, etc) than any other modern country. The money is coming from somewhere, whether your taxes, sales taxes or otherwise. Same at the city level, see all the libertarian utopias that have to contract neighboring towns for trash or are short on water. There’s a lot of magical thinking here, when the critical one would be more helpful
Oh, don’t be fooled, they take some cuts out of the raw ticket sales too, not directly taxed, but something like 50+% of sales doesn’t go to the jackpot. Capitalism loves to take a cut everywhere it can, and it has been allowed to just run completely rampant here.
I wouldn’t say taxes in general are lower everywhere here, that was just the income tax comparison, there’s several other forms of taxes to pay, everywhere they can take a cut, except where the rich can bribe them not too of course.