The $1.9Bn Powerball drawing was delayed last night as one of the states didn’t manage to report in.
That $1.9Bn would have been about $1.3Bn last year but inflation and the Fed have jacked up the annualized payout (which nobody takes) to a much larger amount. The cash amount, after taxes is about $500M from a $930M cash jackpot. There have, so far, been 40 drawings without a winner with close to $4Bn spent chasing a 300 Million to 1 chance of winning.
You often hear that half the money goes to Education but, as you can see from the chart, that’s nonsense it’s about 25% with 3.3% going to the Lottery Administration and 0.3% (1/10th of that) going to Veterans – just so they can tell you how they support Veterans.
US Billionaire Wealth during the pandemic grew by $1.7 TRILLION (Corporate Wealth another $3.4Tn) so if states taxed 10% of that, they would have generated $170Bn for Education, etc. The Federal Government currently spends $60.3Bn on K-12 Education and the states spend $357Bn – $170Bn could have gone a very long way to helping our children…
Instead of taxing the ultra-rich we trick the under-educated poor into spending their money, gambling against ridiculous odds and it’s a fantastic scam that has now captured every state in the Union as who doesn’t need money for Education – even if it’s only 25% of what’s being taken from their citizens?
There’s certainly no inflation in our Education Budget, is there? We’re spending almost 1/3 of what we did in 2010 to Educate our children but, then again, why waste it when we’re also not spending anything to ensure that the Planet has a future anyway? See, it’s just being practical…
Trump slashed the Education Department to $68.2Bn in his first budget and sought to eliminate the Department of Education entirely but found (thank goodness!) he wasn’t legally able to do it. Of course now, with a favorable Supreme court and both houses of Congress – he may be able to pull it off. This is nothing Trump invented, “THEY” have been destroying our Education System ever since College Kids tried to exercise their power in the 60s and almost changed the World:
“They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table to realize how badly they’re getting F’d by a system that threw them overboard 30 F’ing years ago. They don’t want that. Do you know what they want? The want OBEDIANT WORKERS – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
“And now, they’re coming for your Social Security money, they want your F’ing Retirement Money. They want it back – so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it all. They’ll get it all from you eventually.”
Minority (and maybe tomorrow, MAJORITY) Leader McCarthy indicated his support for House Republicans’ increasingly open plotting to threaten a catastrophic economic meltdown in order to force wildly unpopular cuts to the bedrock of American seniors’ financial security.
Leader McCarthy is just the latest of a growing list of extreme MAGA Republicans who have not-so-subtly suggested brutal cuts on Medicare and Social Security. On Sunday, House Whip Steve Scalise admitted to Fox News that the Republican Study Committee’s plan to raise the retirement age, privatize Social Security and slash Medicare is what the GOP really means when it says they want to “shore up & strengthen” these programs.
The Republican Study Committee, which represents a whopping 157 out of 211 House Republicans, holds slashing Medicare and Social Security as a core tenant of their proposed budget, including by:
- Raising the retirement age to 70
- Ending the Medicare guarantee
- Beginning to privatize Social Security
With three out of four House Republicans endorsing these plans to dismantle Medicare and Social Security, it’s clear what the House GOP is going to do if they are put back in power. We’re voting for this today – less Education, less Social Security, no more Medicare (even though we already paid for it) – all so the Already Wealthy can get much wealthier on a planet we are setting a match to.
