After another long day of work at a monotonous job, you can finally go home simply to return back to work for another day of the same task. You don’t have too much income coming in so you are forced to stay at your current employer. You figured the four years of college would pay off and your career would be as it seemed in the video they showed you during tour.
In addition to that you have to pay back $20,000 in loans while interest is adding to that amount every single day. Well you need money and decide to play the lottery. You buy a simple ticket with numbers that are significant to you. Two, the number of years you had your puppy max, 18, the number of days you get for vacation, 46, a number representing an excerpt from your favorite novel. Finally once you’ve picked all the numbers, you buy a ticket. You go home like normal and continue a normal routine of making dinner and placing the kids to bed. The next morning you wake up to find your spouse screaming with a type of excitement that comes close to that of the day you two got married. “You won the lottery. You did it. Yes. We can have that amazing vacation,” says your spouse. Well that’s at least what the lottery wants you to think.
The lottery aims to provide an ideal world where a person can simply pick out numbers and win millions of dollars. Where they can go from a nine to five work day, to being able to vacation year round in the Caribbean. The lottery is built on a hope that your numbers will be selected and you can overnight become rich. While there are many cases where this has occurred, a majority of the people that play the lottery will never win. The lottery is used to help collect tax revenue. This mean each and every time someone plays the lottery they are essentially paying additional taxes.
A recent study from CNNMoney suggest American spend over $70.5 billion on lottery tickets each year exceeding the $62.7 billion spent on sports tickets, books, video games, movie box office and music all combined. This suggest the lottery is an expensive habit that should be treated like an addiction. The lottery thrives off of creating a world of fantasy that many people will never obtain. The lottery has a good reputation by claiming ticket revenue goes to fund education, parks, and health services. In reality, the lottery funding usually goes to “replace rather than supplement excising funding for the targeted programs” (money.cnn.com) suggesting a lack of proper budgeting. Many people are unaware of this due to the many fantasies of winning millions which overshadow the problems within the lottery.
Anyone that plays the lottery on a daily basis is wasting thousands of dollars per year which can be comparable to any addiction. A person playing the lottery may be under an illusion that they deserve to win money beyond their wildest dreams but why does anyone deserve money for doing nothing? You wouldn’t go to a job and ask for money after not working. No one should be allowed to win millions for picking numbers at random which is why people should not play the lottery. The lottery can overtake many people’s lives and ruin their finances. It is a serious problem and needs to be treated like one. The lottery is like a scam that millions of people fall for every day since it’s legal but does that make it right. The lottery will continue to take money from millions of people every year while facing no consequences even though being corrupt.
