Thursday, October 15, 2009

Some People Have All The Luck

Recently, one of our county commissioners who has an addiction to scratch-off lottery tickets finally hit the big time.

He bought a twenty dollar ticket, and won $250,000. Yes, that's two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Went to Pueblo to cash in the ticket, bought a new truck on the way home, and stopped in at one of the c-stores when he got back to town to show it off, buying some more scratch tickets. Won another $100.

A few days later, at the other c-store, he bought another twenty dollar ticket, and won another $253,000.

After taxes he got about $160,000 on the first one. I don't know what he got out of the second one, I stopped listening.

Meanwhile, the Colorado Lottery will be funding a new park, and I believe they'll be naming it after the man who won all that money, because everyone in the county has been going crazy buying scratch tickets thanks to him....

3 comments:

Alan said...

It always amazes me to see people spending money on a lottery.

Odds of winning an average multistate lottery: 1 in 120,000,000.

Odds of dying in a car crash in one year: 1 in 65,000.

No one thinks they'll die in a car crash,even though they're almost 2000 times more likely to die behind the wheel than win the lottery, yet people actually think they have a realistic chance of winning a lottery.

Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math.

FarmGirl said...

Well, at least here in Colorado a good chunk of the money goes to the parks system. So the stupid people who religiously buy tickets are doing a good thing and funding new parks in urban areas, maintenance of existing state parks, and other good things.

So it's not a complete loss.

mustanger said...

"Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math."

To which I say... right on.

Here in Georgia, the state lottery adds funds to the state education system. That would be a good thing if they actually educated the kids instead of giving them babysitting and politically corrected-up indoctrination.