America’s Poor Spend 3% Of Their Income On Lottery Tickets
Perhaps poor American’s would be nearly 3% less poor if they stopped dropping that percentage of their annual income on lottery tickets. According to a recent study lottery tickets are being called the “hidden tax” because families making $13,000 per year or less spend up to 3% of their income in the hopes of striking it rich.
The Business Insider discovered during a PBS interview that poor people don’t care that the odds of winning are 17 times worse than the chance of getting hit by falling airplane parts, they simply keep playing and losing money.
It should be noted that many of those same people are using money from tax breaks, welfare and other public programs to buy their more than often losing lottery tickets.
Various studies place the income spend at 2% to 3% however most experts agree that when lottery’s end up reaching astronomical levels, such as this past weeks $640 million lottery which saw 1.5 billion tickets purchased with just 3 winners there are many more poor people taking part in the chance at getting very rich very quickly.
Interestingly enough even rich people will throw down money on mega millions lottery tickets when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
As one store manager pointed out ahead of this past weeks Mega Millions, while the typical customer would normally spend $2, maybe $3 on lottery tickets it wasn’t uncommon to see people buying $40 even $50 worth of tickets for the chance at the largest lottery prize in United States history.
Just take a look at the picture above, lottery mayhem has become so big in the United States that some stores during huge lotteries require added security personnel.
