A load of old ball(s)! (National Lottery, The)

Member Name: Technical Tobes

Product:	National Lottery, The
Date:	11/11/00 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Money to some 'good' causes

Disadvantages: You'll almost certainly never win anything!

I have to say, I rarely play the National Lottery anymore, least of all watch the crummy TV show!
There are many things I don’t like about the lottery (apologies, this more about the lottery than the TV show, there is nowhere on dooyoo to rant about the actual lottery!)…

The thing I really don’t like is the fact that you win far too much or peanuts!
Being the logical type, the odds of 1 in 15 million chance of winning the jackpot seem so slight, that I would never bother playing with the jackpot in mind, but since the prizes down from the jackpot are hardly worth winning, I don’t very often bother at all.
If I won £5,000,000 on the lottery and put the whole lot in my first-e savings account, just look how much interest I would get EVERY DAY…

6.00% of £5,000,000 is £821.92 per day

Which is…
£5,753.42 / week, £24,931.51 / month or £299,178.08 / year.
(Actually it’s a lot more because I haven’t compounded the interest)

Currently, after the jackpot, the prize plummets to a few tens, (hundreds if you’re lucky) of £££ for 5+bonus, a few hundred £££ for 5 balls matched and rarely more than £100 for 4. Considering you’re still very unlikely to even match 5 in your lifetime, it’s not a very good deal.
So, if they capped & fixed the lottery jackpot at 1 million (mere £60,000 a year interest) and made the lower end prizes greater, I think I, along with many other people would start to play or play more.
When I say cap & fix, I mean make it so that all* jackpot winners get 1 million no more no less, *obviously the lower end prizes would have to take to brunt if there were many jackpot winners and in some cases the £1 million would have to be lower, i.e. if there were some 50 odd jackpot winners!
I’d certainly play then!


The next thing that bothers me, is where the money actually goes, lets take a look…

The
Lottery takes around £5.5 billion in sales each year, of this…
50% goes to the prize fund - £2.5 billion
28% goes to ‘good’ causes and art! - £1.54 billion
13% goes to the government in the form of tax - £720 million
5% goes to retailers as commission - £280 million
4% goes to Camelot -£220 million, (1% - £60 million being pure profit)

Now, ok 50% as prizes seems fair – after all that’s the reason people will buy tickets!
Only 28% to good causes though, that’s not so good, especially since so much of that is wasted on ‘the arts’ – hardly a charity! And of course, many other wastes of money!
13% to the government! Well, I bet you didn’t know that – to be expected though & lets face it, it’s better than them recouping it from income or fuel tax!
5% to retailers sounds fair enough.
4% to Camelot! Having a laugh aren’t they, they state that 3% is operating costs; I always find these statements hard to believe purely because it’s a really easy way for them to get extra cash. 1% profit, not much!!! Now they’re really having a laugh, £60 million pounds pure profit, 90% of businesses don’t make anything like that in profit! Bring of Richard Branson, lets get rid of those snotty nosed, overpaid Camelot idiots!!


Oh, and as for the TV show, why?? All we want to know is what the numbers are, the show is rubbish!


So, the national lottery is basically a big scam to get money from dreamers and the poor under the pretence that it will give most (in reality a quarter) of the proceeds to good causes (note they use the word good cause as opposed to charity), and of course, you stand a chance (incredibly remote chance) of winning millions, or if not millions, perhaps enough is to cover your costs or, if your really lucky perhaps a holiday.


Thanks for reading,
TT.

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