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Comment by ucha | Hacker News Reader

A tax is by definition a compulsory contribution. The lottery is optional. Thus it's not a tax.

Consumption taxes are voluntary. You don't have to pay alcohol duty, or tobacco duty, or fuel duty. You can just refrain from consuming alcohol, tobacco or fuel.

In fact, a decent accountant will show you most taxes are voluntary...

This is a bit of a ludicrous example. Fuel is certainly more necessary than a lottery ticket, and to at least some portion of the population, alcohol and tobacco are as well.

To at least some portion of the population, gambling is a direct parallel to alcohol/tobacco.

There is a compulsory tax on alcohol but its consumption is voluntary. That's like saying an income tax is voluntary because you can choose to not have any income.

That is true. In fact, some people make this argument that people "mooch" off the government by purposefully restricting their income in order to reduce taxes and qualify for welfare programs.

Point of this article is that state lottery monopolies impose a tax on gambling. You aren't free to participate in a pooled-cash chance game without paying the lottery 'tax'. It's a consumption tax on gambling.

That's probably not a very controversial thing to tax, though.

For some individuals, especially with certain psychiatric disorders, moderate use of alcohol to control an episode, especially a panic attack(true panic attacks); is not a voluntary consumption.

The drug has been vilified, for good reason in many cases, but is used as a sedative to the poor who don't have access to good doctors in too many communities.

(I really don't want to debate this. I know when I had panic attacks 2-3 drinks would stop them. I have yet to meet a doctor who won't admit privately that moderate, specific controlled use of alcohol is beneficial to for certain psychiatric disorders. Doctors don't bring it up because it's just not worth worth it. They are afraid of lawsuits because alcohol use carries so many risks, like the real risk of the patient becoming an alcoholic.

(Just keeping it real Homies. If you are currently suffering from an anxiety disorder(including some symptoms of PTSD, and the doctor is just offering a heterocyclic drug(like Prozac), or a drug that really does nothing, like Buspirone. Light, specific use of alcohol will help with some symptoms. Don't abuse the drug. Don't start drinking every day, or drinking socially. You only drink to alleviate specific symptomology. You need to save those liver cells because you use alcohol differently from the rest of the population. In other words; don't become a alcoholic? I'll get a lot of heat from this post, but it's meant for individuals who are suffering, and this advice only goes to individuals who have some self-control? If you didn't have self-control before the illness, and life was just a big party, don't follow this advice. Specific use of alcohol to control your symptomology will just result in your disorder getting worse, and yes--you will end up homeless, or worse. I am not a doctor.)

While I don't know about panic attacks, I think it's known that small quantities of alcohol are either harmless or beneficial to health. The general public can't see shades of grey though, so they only look at the extremes of alcoholism and binge drinking and decide that all alcohol is bad.

Alcohol is a great anti-anxiety drug and sedative, in small doses (like 1-3 drinks). That’s precisely why it has been so popular for thousands of years.

The problems with alcohol are (a) it just treats the symptom and doesn’t help fix whatever underlying issue is causing the stress, (b) it’s easy to take a far larger dose than necessary, far more often than necessary leading to abuse, and (c) acute effects of a large dose and chronic effects of frequent use are both highly destructive.

Yep no one will come and break down your door and point guns at you if you don't play the lottery. (Unlike actual taxes.) At least not yet ...

Nobody will break down your door if you don't pay other taxes either. You don't need to earn income, buy food, or live in a home. You're free to be homeless, jobless, and starving.

If you don't like that, you're welcome to protest and vote for candidates that provide hope for change. That's the system and it's here to protect all of us.

No one will come and break down your door and point guns at you if you don't smoke cigarettes or purchase alcohol.

Yes, because smoking cigarettes or purchasing alcohol is not mandatory. However if you choose to do either, the separate activity of paying taxes on them is.

The only way one can misunderstand this distinction is to believe government is involved in anything by default.

And if you choose to gamble, playing the state run lottery (and not some other form of gambling) is mandatory.

The point of the article is:

"The lottery is not a tax. The inflated price of lottery tickets is."

If you want to play a lottery, you have to play the state's lottery, and the article makes the case that a very high tax is levied for that privilege.

If there were no taxes/transaction fees (ultimately the same thing), then E(any lottery) would be unity. Which is exactly why people smugly say "the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math" - which the article recognizes but discounts just to state it in different terms.

So sure, we can hope that some day that people who desire higher variance can conveniently play non-profit lotteries which won't "cost" them anything in expected value terms. And perhaps separating the nuance between "losing money by playing the lottery" and "being taxed for playing the lottery" is a step on that path. Although I think it's likely that privacy technology solves this problem before the cathedral does.

But this doesn't change GP's implying that not buying alcohol or cigarettes is equivalent to not paying the taxes on what you have bought. I suppose this nitpick is so divisive because people either view playing the lottery as equivalent to paying a tax due to that long held adage and that most every transaction is simply giving money directly to the government, or as the act of playing the lottery with an inbuilt tax as the article has led them to. But IMHO if you want to highlight the nuance of the latter, you'd be better off pointing out how people that run/play private lotteries are thrown in jail rather than equating tangible vices with purely throwing money away.

That happens for tax evaders?

SWAT teams have been used in the US to serve subpoenas, so yes, it is a possibility.

In extreme cases it does. You hear it pop up on the news every once in a while in the US.

The IRS is the most feared government department in the US. I would say people fear it even more than they do the NSA.

That's what happens to tax evaders who fail to evade enough taxes to pay off the people in charge. It does not apply to entities that are too big to fail and too big to jail.

Sure: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/30/us/3-businessmen-testify-o...

This is incorrect. When you buy a ticket, a portion of the price goes to the government. This portion is not optional. Therefore it is compulsory. Hence the author's argument.

Then that portion is the tax, not the lottery ticket itself. In the same way that there's a tax on alcohol, but the alcohol itself is not a tax because no one's forcing you to buy it. The author himself states: "The lottery is not a tax. The inflated price of lottery tickets is"... which makes his headline "The lottery is a tax" shameless clickbait.

I think this characterisation is excessively persnickety.

Much like many other comments on this article, that seem to have been written in a painful rush to demonstrate just how damn rational the comment author is.

The headline is neither wrong nor sensationalised, and the article is nuanced and cogent.

I am of the opinion that comment authors should, if capable, explain his or her reasons for thinking the way he or she does, without resorting to throwing unqualified insults.

Furthermore, I think everyone has a right to his or her own opinion.

You know, if you read the article, you will find the author agrees with you.

All taxes are optional. You don't want to pay income tax? Don't earn income. Actually come to think of it, that's the conservative argument against income tax, some people will supposedly earn less because they don't want to pay the tax.

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