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"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.
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It would be fairer if the state returned the money to taxpayers and funded education out of the general fund.
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And yet somehow education still doesn't seem to have enough funding, despite the lotteries raking in cash.
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Education has plenty of funding. Per pupil K-12 spending has grown relentlessly higher than inflation for decades.
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And somehow academic performance rarely improves and at a guess that's because raw spending is the wrong metric...

https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-weak-relation...

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Well, aren't they though, technically?

Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?

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> No one will sell you any stocks for $1,

You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.

Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.

Also, there's like penny stocks. :P

But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.

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ETFs have sold for $1 for quite a while.
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Expected return on a total market fund is 9 to 10% annually. Expected return on a lottery ticket is 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.

Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.

So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.

But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.

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The expected return on lottery is -30-50%.
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So 30 to 50 cents on the dollar then like I said?
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I dont think the post you are replying to was saying gambling on lotteries is rational. They are just saying the best possible outcome of buying a lottery ticket is much, much higher than buying an index fund (and the average, median, and worst outcomes are much worse)
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