Money For Nothing

 Somebody just won more than a billion dollars in a MegaMillions lottery sweepstakes. The tiny sliver of a chance that anyone has to win such a contest turned into a great big payday for one lucky resident of Maine. It is precisely at this moment that my mind begins to churn out questions about such a windfall: How much of that wad of cash will the winner actually see? What sort of tax does one have to pay on a prize like that? If I won that kind of money, would I show up for work the next morning? 

And so on. The way this kind of money gets doled out speaks loudly to the question of the American Dream. Sure we want to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but if someone drops a big crate of cash on our front doorstep, we don't tend to worry too much about that whole work ethic thing. Currently we have a few big "winners" like Elon "Gate" Musk and Donald "MAGAT" Trump whom we tend to hold up as role models in the Sweepstakes of Life. Both of them benefitted greatly from the leg up they were given by their daddies. Fred Trump helped his son win the lottery by bringing him on as a part of the family business, even bringing him along for their violations of the Fair Housing Act in 1973. Elon's dad Errol bought an emerald mine in 1969, and he made "so much money we couldn't even close our safe." Then he dropped a sack of money in his little boy's lap so that he could be whatever he wanted to be: an engineer, an inventor, and eventual holder of the record for the most money lost by an individual in one year. 

These men did not play the lottery, but whoever won that jackpot up in Maine could turn around and buy a baseball team, or a weekend at the International Space Station. Or a run for president. Or a cable news network. Or comfort from the concerns of ever having to play the lottery again. You'd be worth twice as much as Stephen King, and you never had to spend any time behind a typewriter. Or be sued by the government for abuses of the Fair Housing Act.