I think that we Brits only pay tax on the interest; like any capital gains tax.
This is the problem, though. It’s not a “minuscule” chance. It’s genuinely zero. That’s why the “people who can’t do math” joke came about. What lotteries really do is exploit the hopelessness of large groups of people. It’s a regressive tax. Those people buying a lottery ticket because they have no way to earn retirement savings? They are literally setting that money on fire, but they don’t know that because human brains can’t visualize extremely large or extremely small numbers. It may not be much money, but even using it to buy a nice coffee once in a while would improve their quality of life a lot more, if they understood what a false hope it is. Lotteries need to go away. Tax the rich, not the poor.
False hope is not ethical any more than placebo medicine is.
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