If it's not your money then just back off.

380 million dollars split between two winners. We know who the first winner is. He had to sit through a press conference and have his face splashed all over national television. Now everyone knows who they are and exactly how much money they have. I would not want that to be me. (Not that it even could be. I don't play along with the lottery. I'd rather have the money I have than hope for money I don't have much chance of winning.)

So why hasn't the second winner shown up yet? I doubt they're going to walk away from all that money, but it is hard to think about all the attention that will be coming their way. After you get past the big press conference, everyone in the world will know. Your family, your friends, and all the people that think you owe them something from the days you knew them. There will probably be lots of people you don't even know that will come out of the woodworks too. It's no wonder that whoever has the other winning ticket hasn't said anything yet, but there are still people making public appeals to this anonymous stranger to step forward.

Now for an interesting question: why not just take the money and avoid all the press? Wouldn't that be much easier? Well, most people don't realize it, but your lottery ticket has a nice little message on the back that informs you that if you win you are legally obligated to let the lottery use you to show how easy it is to win. So you have to play along.

I'm still waiting for the episode on CSI or NCIS where the lotto winner is attacked/abucted for the money. Maybe it was already on and I just missed it. Anyway, it you're the person with the ticket and your reading this, then do whatever you want. I don't feel the need to tell you what to do. You've got plenty of your own problems to worry about.

Will a national lottery save our economy?

One of the ideas to deal with the massive debt over our country that is floating around Washington these days is creating a national lottery. If it works at a state level, why can't it work on a national level? This could be just the thing to pull out country out of debt. Let's take a moment to look at state lotteries before we discuss a national lottery.

Gambling has been around for a long time. I'm not sure when it started. Maybe when Eve was pregnant Adam thought the kid would be a boy and he was so certain he made a wager with Eve about it. Regardless of how it started, gambling has been a part of our lives for most of our existence. It's easy to see the appeal of a wager on random events. There is a thrill in the uncertainty of it all. This is why Vegas and other casino cities exist and thrive. There is always someone willing to take a chance on the big money.

One day somebody had the brilliant idea of setting up a lottery for the state to raise funds. Why shouldn't the state get in on some of that gambling money? In order to sell the idea to the rest of the state the lottery was set up to help fund education. (I'm not sure how much money actually goes into education.) Lots of other states have gotten in on the idea since then.

Are there benefits that could come from a national lottery? Absolutely. Look at the amount of money that is spent on state lotteries. There is a lot of interest in the concept of the lottery. New York does a great job of selling lottery tickets with adds like "all you need is a dollar and a dream." A national lottery could take a chunk out of our national debt. It is also conceivable that over time we could even eliminate the national debt.

Would it be possible to set the lottery up? That is a different story. Any state that is already making pretty significant amounts of money on their own lotteries will not be interested in competition from a national lottery that will be capable of boasting much larger awards. Anyone who has a choice between the two will have many more incentives to buy a national ticket. If the concept ever gets moving, there will be lots of opposition.

Will there be disadvantages? There are lots of concerns about the lottery on any level. The first is that a lottery only takes money from poorer citizens. No one who has a million dollars in the bank is going to bother spending a dollar on a ticket for a chance at a million dollars. Anyone with that much money will find gambling options with better odds and bigger stakes. The people most likely to participate in a lottery are the people who can least afford to spend the money.

Also there is the expense of setting the system up. The estimates I have seen suggest that it would cost close to a billion dollars to set up a national lottery system. This would mean that every man woman and child in the US would have to buy four tickets just to cover the cost of starting the program (assuming that the government would be willing to sell a ticket for a dollar a pop.)

I don't see a national lottery as an effective method of removing our national debt. It will probably cause more problems than it solves. Here's to hoping someone comes up with a better idea before too long. Leave a thought below if you have any feed back.