Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

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The data would beg to differ. You have to keep in mind the demographic makeup of the US. More than half of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings - total. [1] Only 15% of Americans have more than $10k saved. Now take that $80 billion figure from the lottery. There are currently about 245 million adults in the US. About 49% of Americans play state lotteries. [2] Now let's do the math. That's $80.55 billion / (245 million * 0.49) = $671 spent on lotteries on average!! It is very safe to say that there are alot of people spending all, or near all, of what could be their life savings on lottery tickets.

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...

Half of Americans have < $1,000 in their savings account - yes, that is true.

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...

I think that stat means 64% of Americans don't rent.

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."

I'm not saying that is a good situation or the picture is rosy. The real question here is one of semantics - do you include home equity in "life savings"? I would say yes. And using a HELOC for a crypto or lottery tickets are both bad things IMO.

I totally agree, just wanted to clarify that "homeowner" is a generous term in the US intended to make people feel like they own an entire home on the day they close the sale, instead of the reality that they usually own a mortgage balance along with a small chunk of that home.

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