America has started to lose its damn mind with lottery fever after the current Powerball jackpot grew to over $1 billion following Saturday's winner-less drawing.
And we're not just talking about terrible math.
Math is hard. #Powerball pic.twitter.com/Md3BetFZQd— Tyler Roney (@TylerJRoney) January 11, 2016
No, the country is becoming obsessed with Powerball and its huge jackpot. Of course, $1.4 billion is an almost unfathomable amount of money for anyone this side of Warren Buffet, but the actual payout is much lower; MarketWatch estimates that a cash payout would, depending on state taxes, yield a winner less than $300 million in total. Not that $300 million is anything to complain about, of course.
Still, we're all wild about Powerball but there are plenty of strange sideshows to keep an eye on before the balls drop on Wednesday night.
Scandal? What scandal?
Few seem to care that the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, is still reeling from a scandal in which its former security director Eddie Tipton allegedly used his access to the association's random number generators to know winning combinations in advance, then he and his associates played those numbers and shared the prizes.
Tipton was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to 10 years for fraud in relation to a 2010 Hot Lotto jackpot, but, as of December, at least five states were investigating potential cases in which Tipton and his associates won rigged lottery games.
No allegations have been made against Tipton or his associates alleging any rigging of Powerball drawings, which it seems is good enough for players who are buying tickets by the boatload.
State tax bonanza
Like many states, Kansas is facing a budget crunch in the coming years and trying to figure out how to close that gap. Well, the winning Powerball ticket could go a long way towards helping out Kansas - or many other states - with putting a little money back in the bank.
If a Coloradan took home that lump sum, that’d be close to $33 million in state tax revenue. #Powerball #coleg https://t.co/LetknsGo9m— Chris Harrop (@ChrisHarrop) January 11, 2016
The Topeka Capital-Journal explores how a winning ticket could generate up to $40 million for the state in taxes if the winner were from Kansas and elected to take the cash payout. That's not enough to fix budget woes forever but, according to the paper, it's enough to put the state in the black for the rest of the year.
That's hanging a lot of hope on a incredibly longshot lottery win, though, so Kansas better be looking elsewhere for spare change.
Not that everything is rosy for states that participate in Powerball. During one jackpot build-up last year, the State of Illinois, which is knee-deep in a budget quagmire, said if an Illinois resident won the jackpot, the winner wouldn't receive payments until the state's budget battle was over. That decision, as you might have guessed, has resulted in some lawsuits.
There's an app for that
In these mega-huge jackpot scenarios, one way a lot of people like to play is pooling resources with friends or coworkers. It helps cut down on the money every chips in while still giving players a chance at bringing home a nice chunk of prize money in the unlikely event of a win.
Lottery Pool Boss is a new app that lets users organize their office pools, keeping track of who spent how much in what pool. You can't purchase tickets through the app, but as an organizational tool, it may help prevent the inevitable lawsuit that follows an office pool win.
Bad advice
The odds of winning the Powerball as of Monday evening are somewhere in the range of 1-in-292 million. That's... not very good. In case you were wondering.
The odds of winning #Powerball's $1.4 billion jackpot are 1 in 292 million. https://t.co/mLB7hebYfZ pic.twitter.com/oQqnsvZdIl— ABC News (@ABC) January 11, 2016
But that hasn't stopped some people from giving really terrible advice on how to win the Powerball. Richard Lustig, who has won the lottery seven times, was on Fox & Friends on Saturday and gave some really bad advice on how to win the lottery: buy as many tickets as possible.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Critics have chided the lottery as an exploitation of America's poor. So Lustig's is advice is terrible particularly because lower income residents across America are the ones most likely to buy lottery tickets, be it local scratch-offs or Powerball, losing, on average 47 cents on the dollar.
But if that's not enough to convince you of the long odds, The Los Angeles Times has a great simulator that allows you to see with your own eyes how incredibly difficult it is to win Powerball.
Of course, for all the criticism and impossible odds, America is still buying Powerball tickets at an astronomical clip.
From 3-4 p.m. today (two days ahead of the drawing) #Texas had $1,048,570 in #Powerball sales. That’s $17,476 per minute. #TexasLottery— Texas Lottery (@TexasLottery) January 11, 2016
Better advice would probably be "move to Puerto Rico" where there is no state tax, you can buy Powerball tickets, and even if you lose, at least the weather is nice.
Whoever wins the Powerball should immediately move to Puerto Rico...Federal income tax is only 4%, no 'state' tax.— Eric Falkenstein (@egfalken) January 11, 2016