More accurately: winner chose lump sum, which was then taxed
That the government can tax their own money they give away is disgusting
That the government can tax their own money they give away is disgusting
What makes the lottery slightly different is "YOLO": yeah on average it is not a good play, but someone presumably wins, and for their one shot in life it gets transformed with generational wealth.
That is: go big or go home.
... well, except that most lottery winners lose it all, but that's a different issue.
To emphasize, I'm not advocating playing the lottery, just that odds don't really account for the biological reality of only getting one life to live.
Ostensibly it's "earmarked" ... but by supposed earmarking, legislatures think they can otherwise defund said "positive social programs" from the general budget
You start negative because you have to pay for the ticket
I also have a problem with government employees (who, by definition, are paid with tax dollars) being taxed on their pay
It's beyond ridiculous!
Creating an exception for income received from the government would lead to all sorts of crazy fraud, and would necessitate long and complex codes for determining what is an exempt government agency and what isn't.
For example: is a community college a government agency for purposes of "tax exempt" income? What about a utility district? What about private-public partnerships?
Why is it fair for any entity to demand your personal property at gunpoint?
Let me introduce you to the US tax code ...
Until the passage of the 16th amendment, it wasn't.
It may be that having special cases and extra complexity has a higher overhead than just getting everyone to use the same path, even if that looks like "more" work from a distance.
I dread to think how this may work if an individual has multiple income streams, some possibly for the public sector (so would be tax exempt), and how that may affect the total used to calculate tax brackets and similar. And the politics of defining that - no doubt whatever rules you use for this they'll be some situations that people consider unfair.
It also makes it easier to compare income against the private sector, as each dollar income means exactly the same if both then go through the same tax system.
The US tax system is already designed to put as much burden on the individual as possible (for whatever reason - possibly mostly lobbying from the industry that has grown up around this complexity) - more complexity feels pretty bad to me.