But… What the time traveler does with their winnings affects the past as much as anything, right?
Here’s the scenario: the jackpot is, $257 million (WA MegaMillions jackpot 2013-11-30 21:29PST), with the cash option of $139.2 Million, and after the 35% lottery tax about $48.72 Million. The time traveler wins $48.72 Million, and has three general options.
- The time traveler takes the winnings immediately to the future, thus removing $48.72 million from the economy causing a (small) decrease in economic activity. People who would have been paid for their goods and services with some of that money and end up being poorer for the time traveler’s monkeying around with the lottery.
- The time traveler sticks around with the money and uses it to buy things before taking them to the future or leaving them in the past. Either way the time traveler returns to the future (the long way or the short way, it doesn’t matter) without the winnings. This stimulates economic activity, and is probably good for the economy generally.
- The time traveler puts the money in some kind of investment, returns to the future and reaps the rewards of the interest rate. This can be good for the economy (the money sits in a money market, or some kind of good stable mutual fund) and is used as loan fodder, since the time traveler doesn’t withdraw it for however many years there are between our present and the traveler’s home time. On the other hand it could be a waste, if unwisely invested and simply end up as lost capital, and diffuse into the debt structure of an investment that loses money anyway. Essentially being a waste of cash.
What I mean to say is, using time travel to alter the past (by winning the lottery) will alter the past (no ifs ands or buts)… and I posit that going forward in time with the money to the traveler’s point of origin is probably the worst choice, economically speaking, since it robs the present of both the existence of the cash (unexpected deflation), and it prevents (possibly positive) economic activity in the intervening time that the temporally disjointed cash could have done. Also, the cash brought to the future is an inflationary force. If a lot of time travelers did it, then the past would have problems with deflation from the disappearing money, while the future would have inflation from money essentially being minted from non-government sources.
