Pork-barrel proletariat

Many people fear the vertiginous debt mountain piled up the US federal government, but, at least with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, they can still keep racking it up for the foreseeable future.  For many American cities and states, there is no future – they’re going bankrupt.  Which is why the record lottery win in the USA of $640 million is good news for local legislatures.  At odds of 176 million to one, purchasers were more likely to be crushed to death by a machine vending the ticket falling on top of them than they were to actually claim the prize.  But that didn’t deter people from piling in to pile another $100 million onto the rollover $540 million.  The three ‘lucky’ figures could either get a lump sum of $462 million - i.e. $154 million each - or get staggered yearly payments of the amount (a cool $178 million is divvied out in smaller amounts to people who got some but not all the numbers).  But that figure of $154 million is misleading because each winner only gets a little over half of that, with roughly 15 per cent detailed to retailer and lottery operating costs and, here is where the dollar signs pops up in politicians’ eyes, 35 per cent is allocated to state governments.  Man, that’s going to fill a hole (though a financial black hole will just keep on eating away at budget margins).  With the trillions of dollars of debt held by the US government, significant inroads could be made into that if they set up a state-run lottery and their slice of the fortune explicitly allocated to paying down the deficit.  After all, a lottery is often described as a tax on the ignorant.  Then again, it’s unlikely to get past a Republican-dominated House of Representatives because they would see it as an expansion of the role of government.  If only Swift were alive today.