Should there be a cap on the size lottery jackpots are allowed to reach?
The top award lottery jackpot on many lotteries can climb up to tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. And n most cases when there is a winner, it is a sole person winning a very large sum of money. Some people think that that is a good thing as it not only promotes the lottery but the aspect of making instant millionaires is highly attractive to players and pumps money through the economy from the winnings they sped or invest. But some others think that having such high jackpots that gives so much money to a single person is ridiculous and utterly foolish and not what the lottery is intended for.
How big is too big?
So should lottery jackpots be capped at a maximum level or should lottery jackpots be allowed to grow until they are won? It’s an interesting question with differing points of view. For instance, the pro side of the argument says that with uncapped jackpots, the higher the prize goes the more tickets get bought and the more money from the ticket sales go towards benefiting charities. Having one prosper win a huge jackpot is part of the attraction and in being able to make an instant millionaire the lottery can change a person’s life and give them the means to live their life in style. Huge jackpots are a marketing tactic that increase ticket sales and the number of people who play the lottery. The huge jackpot and the ability for a winner to do what they want with all that money is what attracts the gaming public.
On the other side, they say that huge jackpots won by a single player is an instant shock to the person’s system and when suddenly tens of millions of dollars are available to them, they will spend that money without thinking and eventually end up back where they started from, defeating the purpose of have a lottery in the first place.
They feel that capping lottery jackpots is more responsible so no one can find themselves with so much money that they spend it irresponsibly. Capping a jackpot, say at ten million dollars, provides the freedom that the lottery operator markets, while distributing the rest of the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into smaller jackpots so more people have a chance of winning maybe one or two million dollars, thus distributing lottery jackpot money across a wide section of players. The purpose behind this is to make million dollar jackpots available to many more players to spread the wealth and be fair to the gaming public.
Billion dollar jackpots
For instance, Powerball in the United States has an uncapped jackpot that can reach over a billion dollars. Lotto Max in Canada is capped at seventy million dollars with one million dollar jackpots created by ticket sales over the seventy million cap. But even a cap on the Lotto Max jackpot does not deter frenzy buying as the cap is quite high.
So although some lottery jackpots are capped and some are not, the fact is that players will continue to buy tickets and any thought of low caps on jackpots just isn’t in the industry’s interest. So unlimited and high-capped lottery jackpots are here to stay and can make a winner into a multi-million dollar instant millionaire.
Sources
Experience in the gaming industry.