Nation's Financial Journalists Bravely Calculate Taxes On Money You Will Never Have

The $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot is $1.6 billion in the same way your Uber is "3 minutes away." The headline number exists in a quantum state—simultaneously real enough to get you to buy a ticket and fictional enough to evaporate upon observation by the Internal Revenue Service.

By the time federal taxes (37%), state taxes (~10%), and the lump-sum discount finish waterboarding your windfall, that $1.6 billion is $527 million. You didn't win a billion dollars. You won a really nice suburb. The Powerball's marketing department deserves a Nobel Prize in Creative Accounting for getting "billion" into a headline about half a billion dollars. This is the financial equivalent of Tinder photos from 2019.

The Correction Heard 'Round The Trading Floor

MarketWatch, a publication that exists solely to explain numbers to people, issued a correction because they calculated lottery taxes for California—a state that does not tax lottery winnings. This is not a typo. The premier financial news outlet did fake math for a fake tax in an article about fake odds of winning fake money.

They then corrected it to use "a state with a 10% tax rate"—not a specific state, just a state, like a student who forgot to cite sources and wrote "according to experts." These are the people explaining inflation to your parents. These are the adults in the room.

The Grammar of Delusion

"You just won the big $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot." Not "someone." Not "a hypothetical winner." YOU. You, specifically, the person reading this on the toilet at work. You, who checked your bank account before buying coffee this morning. The lottery-media complex has perfected a linguistic technology more powerful than any casino's oxygen-pumped, windowless floor: the second-person future tense.

"You just won" is doing more heavy lifting than any sentence in English. It's a grammatical hallucination. It's fan fiction about your tax bracket. The article addresses you as a billionaire 0.00000034% of readers will become—which, coincidentally, is the same success rate as the lottery itself.

Fourth Place Is First Place (For Losers)

"The fourth-largest jackpot in Powerball history." They're out here hyping bronze. Somewhere, three larger jackpots are laughing. This is "World's Tallest Jockey" energy. But here's the trick: "Fourth largest EVER" still contains the word "billion," and the American brain stem shuts off after "billion."

The Odds, Whispering

Here is what you will not find given equal headline real estate: 1 in 292,201,338. Those are your odds. Written out, that's one in two hundred ninety-two million, two hundred one thousand, three hundred thirty-eight. For context: you are 300 times more likely to be struck by lightning. You are more likely to become President. You are more likely to be crushed by a vending machine.

The coverage ratio is inverted: 99% jackpot, 1% odds. This is architectural. The lottery is a storytelling machine, and stories require winners. The odds are the terms and conditions. Nobody reads the terms and conditions.

It is regressive: the poor buy more tickets proportionally. It is voluntary: no one forces the purchase. It is celebrated: the news covers it like the Super Bowl. The government has gamified revenue extraction and we have applauded. Every jackpot story is inadvertent propaganda for a poverty tax wearing a sequin dress.