I thought this one up, all by myself, this weekend as I was sitting under a tree in my backyard sipping an Old Milwaukee and puffing on a Pall Mall Ultra Lite. The U.S. Federal Government should have a lottery. Not a lottery as we know it. State lotteries target middle to low income people who, because of a poor understanding of math and a dream of the big score, waste money that should be going to more important things, like a savings account.
Well, back to the idea. The government sells lottery tickets for, say, $10 each. The lottery winners don't win a pile of cash, instead, they become exempt from all taxes for an entire year. Imagine, no property tax, sales tax, income tax, etc. This wouldn't appeal to people who are dirt poor. They, quite frankly, don't pay much in tax so there's not much at stake for them, besides, they shouldn't be playing the lottery, anyway. Here, a productive member of society gets rewarded! Corporations would not be eligible. The lottery could be run weekly with multiple winners guaranteed from different geographic regions. Somebody in D.C. could figure out how many winners to have. You also would not have the problem that we see so often where somebody wins several million dollars and his life goes down the tubes and he's broke in six months!
Like I said, this is my idea. Any municipality is welcome to adopt all or part of it. You are very welcome.
