Remember back before people were afraid of change? When I say “change”, I mean “currency” and not “something different”. People have been averse to the “something different” type of change for a long time. This whole if-I-touch-a-nickel-I’ll-die thing is fairly recent.
Anyway, back when you could use actual change to buy something, this scenario happened quite frequently:
I’d buy something that cost close to a whole dollar amount. Let’s say it’s a doughnut for $1.83 (I have no idea how much a doughnut costs). When it was my turn to pay, I’d give the millennial behind the counter two one-dollar bills and an extra eight cents. That way, I get a quarter back in change and I’ll have less change bouncing around in my pocket.
Invariably, the first thing they’d do is try to hand me back the eight cents. After all, I obviously paid them too much for the doughnut. I would tell them to just run the transaction with the $2.08. With a confused look on their face, they’d type the info into the register, and I’d get my quarter.
All was well as long as they had a cash register or calculator handy. If they had to do that complex math in their heads, all bets were off. I’d typically have to help them crunch the numbers.
Deciding whether or not to get vacksinated is a risk vs. reward analysis. On one hand, you’ve got a disease that you most likely won’t even know you have. And on the other hand, you’ve got all the adverse side affects that comes from being vacksinated that you may or may not get.
In many cases, recovery from being vacksinated takes longer than it does to recover from the disease it was designed to protect you from. Someone considering getting vacksinated is deciding if they want to gamble with their life by being injected with something that could quite possibly seriously injure or kill them, just to be protected from something they don’t need to be protected from.
So, a lot of people decided not to get vacksinated. And, a lot of them are under 40 which is the you-won’t-even-get-sick-from-the-disease demographic. Which also includes the can’t-do-basic-math-in-your-head demographic.
To entice these mathematically-impaired twenty-somethings, some local governments are holding cash lotteries where you’re automatically entered once you get vacksinated. So far, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia have announced lotteries.
Put another way, these states are creating an opportunity for people to literally gamble with their life.
Here in California, the Governor recently gave out several $50,000 prizes to recently-vacksinated people. He’ll be awarding ten grand prizes of $1.5M in a few weeks. The odds of winning $1.5M is about 1 in 2 million. On the other hand, the odds of getting seriously injured or killed from the vacksine is…well…no one knows for sure.
The state made a big deal of advertising the lottery and a bunch of people who normally wouldn’t have gotten vacksinated decided that potentially winning 50 grand was a big enough carrot to entice them.
But here’s the thing that was hidden in the fine print: That prize money is taxable income.
That new truck or fishing boat you might win? Taxable. The college tuition being given away as a prize? That’s right. It’s also taxable. California, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Washington all tax the prizes. West Virginia quite likely does too but I can’t verify that. [There’s lots of information about West Virginia’s “first dog” but not much about the actual vacksine lottery.]
So, instead of potentially winning $50,000, after taxes it’s more like $35,000.
But it gets worse.
Let’s say, for example, that the winner is employed with an annual salary of $100,000. The extra $50K is going to push him into a higher tax bracket. So, he’ll end up paying more taxes on his $100,000 salary because that money gets taxed at the higher rate too. Let’s keep the math simple and say that he’ll pay an extra $5K in taxes on his $100K because of his temporarily-higher tax bracket. Now, the $50,000 lottery win is looking more like $30,000.
Come next April, instead of getting a refund, he may have to write a check to the government.
The states are waving a big carrot in front of people who don’t know that there’s going to be a huge bite taken out of it. How many people are betting their lives, and the lives of their kids, for a chance to win a prize that isn’t nearly as big as they’re being led to believe?
The odds of winning the prize money are enthusiastically promoted by the government, but there is no possible way for you to calculate the odds of losing. Sure, you can calculate the odds against winning the prize money, but you can’t determine your chances of serious injury or death. Because no one can.
The people who are falling for the vackseen lottery scam are the same people who are confused by $2.08 worth of change. If they understood how the math worked, they might decide that the potential reward doesn’t justify the risk.
Not, that is, when you’re gambling with your life.
