Get Rich Quick, Ruin Your Life Quicker (Commentary)

One of my classmates wrote an interesting thread about the lottery and the effects on those who win it. Braden's article, Get Rich Quick, Ruin Your Life Quicker, made some great points. People who tend to be less wealthy are generally the ones who purchase lottery tickets on a regular basis. Millions of people spend millions of dollars on these tickets in hopes of winning the jackpot. The chances of this are so slim, it's ridiculous. Yet people continue to waste their money on it.

Braden told a story of a man who won the lottery and lived to regret even buying the ticket: "He won a 315,000,000 dollar lottery. Within 10 years, his daughter and granddaughter had died of drug overdose, his wife had divorced him and he spent his time lounging in strip clubs, where at one point he was drugged and was robbed of over 500 thousand dollars. Later he wept to reporters 'I wish I’d torn that ticket up.'” Braden went on to state that lotteries are "one of the most cunning ways that the government uses to raise money. The governments market the get-rich-quick scheme to the people who are most desperate and are willing to spend what money they do have on tickets."

Personally, I don't think it's necessarily the smartest thing to play the lottery. The money people spend on it could be spent in more constructive, productive ways. They need to understand it's just another way to funnel money into the government's pockets.