Are Irs Form 13844 Poverty 2025

Hello, I'm Simon Whistler. You're watching the Today I Found Out YouTube channel. Bend in the video today, we're looking at the lottery and its surprisingly common sad after massive winnings. It's been called a voluntary tax on the poor and the undereducated, with people spending a whopping sixty billion dollars a year on it in the United States alone. Most of these lottery tickets are purchased by low-income individuals. In total, about 20% of Americans play the lottery. Despite the high number of lotto tickets purchased annually, when playing the lottery in all of its forms, you'll win an average of just 53 cents for every $1 you spend, making it one of the lowest return rates of any form of commercial gambling. Thus, it's extremely profitable for the various government bodies who run the lotteries. According to a study by Emily Hayes Lee et al., they can get away with this low return rate by pricing the tickets so cheap compared to the potential payoff that people just keep coming back for more. Low-income people, among other reasons, according to the study's findings, were significantly more likely to play as they perceive their own wealth to be lower than average. Thus, they attempt a low-cost way to rectify the issue, even though they know the chances of it working out are incredibly low. Now, if they added up all of the money they spent on lottery tickets overtime and had to pay it all at once, they'd probably not be nearly as willing to play. The most startling number in all of this is that those who make thirteen thousand dollars per year or less in the United States, on average, spend about five percent of their gross annual earnings on lottery tickets. And winning the lottery isn't apparently all it's cracked...