If non-professional investors start putting their life savings into Bitcoin and it crashes, the government can't just say "though break, you will starve on retirement"
That's hundreds of dollars per person if each and every adult in the US bought exactly an equal share of all lottery tickets. In reality only x% of people play and the distribution is going to he heavily distorted. Lotteries are a major drain on society, but government's love the 'free' money. So we have them.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/215265/sales-of-us-state...
Because to me it should be easy to understand that Lottery isn't marketed/treated as an investment (crypto has started to be legitimately treated as such), and historical returns don't suggest it would work.
Crypto is just attractive enough it could pull the wrong type of attention from everyday people acting as investors.
I don't agree with direct regulation, but I can definitely see why the government would be worried.
Lottery tickets are almost always negative expected value which means you're basically lighting money on fire, and governments worldwide love them. More generally the US government acts as an oligarchy. Government self interest, followed by special interests are what generally drive government action. Public utility (and opinion) play a very minor role. And yes, I even have a source for this as well as I understand this is not what many people want to believe. [3]
[1] - https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/25/how-much-does-the-...
[2] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/193874/half-americans-play-state...
[3] - http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
However, around 64% of Americans own their home [1]. How many of them are taking out HELOCs against their homes to buy lottery tickets? Once concern is people are taking out HELOCs for crypto speculation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
Homeowner is not the right term for most of that 64%, because most have a mortgage balance, which when subtracted from their < $1,000 in savings, makes the picture even uglier, and makes most of their future financial well-being dependent and correlated with their local real estate market.
Edit: The stat actually means 64% of homes are occupied by their owner. But "owner" is still misleading, as the article linked to above says:
"However, homeowner equity has fallen steadily since World War II and is now less than 50% of the value of homes on average."
Lotteries explicitly and extensively inform the consumer precisely what their odds of getting a significant ROI are (namely "slim to none") and lotteries are heavily audited and regulated to make sure they deliver exactly those odds. When polled, those that play understand those odds for the most part and those who play the lottery compulsively understand that they have a problem, in spite of the compulsion.
A rather poor choice of analogy since I think all of us would be perfectly happy if these cryptocurrencies were managed the same way.
What if I say they do something bad with that debt too, is it still OK?
b) Interest rates are being paid for decades via taxes, money that could have been put to use much better. I'd say it's similar enough and don't think "it works differently" is an argument here
Put as question: how much would you like legally binding financial advice by someone up to their ears in debt?
"Legally binding" and "advice" are mutually exclusive concepts. And it's 100% possible you can give great financial advice and be in debt. "Max out your 401k and a Roth IRA" is great advice in 99% of circumstances. Just because someone is paying off high interest credit cards instead doesn't make the advice invalid or their choice of priorities incorrect.
Anyone who has applied a modicum of thought to the issue. The US already has more per-capita public funding going to healthcare than any other nation, we simply don't get a good return on it because that is perceived as "socialism".
And pursuing a highly conservative fiscal policy (far off the right side of the Overton window) is not going to change that, nor advance the cause of said "socialist" policies. It's flabbergasting that you would suggest that as any kind of a reasonable cause-and-effect.
If I spend all my money but still owe creditors more, that's what I'm on the hook for. That's real debt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage#Seigniorage_as_a_t...
"Economists regard seigniorage as a form of inflation tax, redistributing real resources to the currency issuer. Issuing new currency, rather than collecting taxes paid out of the existing money stock, is then considered in effect a tax that falls on those who hold the existing currency."
That makes inflation distortionary, not some ideal tax on wealth. Governments can't just run away with inflation as an alternative to tax.