eli5 Rather than having 1 winner with the lottery with sometimes over 1 hundred million pounds, why not share that money out amongst many, many people?

Question

Is there a reason that most of the time there is only 1 jackpot winner? When the winning money goes into the tens of millions I always think, why not just share the money out over lots of people and give say 10,000 here and 500,000 there. Wouldn’t this be better for the economy rather than having just 1 person have it all?

In: Economics

Answer 1

Lotteries are not designed to be “good for the economy”.

It’s a *voluntary* tax used to fund government programs.

They sell $100 M in tickets. They take $40 M and use it to fund something (schools, parks, etc). They give $60 M to the ‘winner’ as an incentive to get people to volunteer to participate.