Smells fishy

 Two California Tickets Share Jackpot Win

 RELEASE DATE: 12/9/2023

 Two tickets sold in California will share the tenth Mega Millions® jackpot won in 2023, just in time for the holidays! Both were purchased at the Chevron station located at 18081 Ventura Boulevard in Encino. They matched all six numbers in Friday night’s drawing – the white balls 21, 26, 53, 66 and 70, plus the gold Mega Ball 13. The estimated prize had grown to $395 million ($189.0 million cash) since it was last won in Texas by a South Dakota-based trust on October 6.

LOL: I played the 25 hottest numbers in the last 50 drawings and only one of them came up

 

One $1.337 billion jackpot winner in Illinois, and . . .

 

When Republicans like Rush Limbaugh keep blaming loss of the House on "retirements", just remember Republicans didn't even run candidates in 38 districts

Republicans ran no one against the Democrat in 38 districts in 2018:

 

AL-7

AZ-7

CA-5

CA-6

CA-13

CA-20

CA-27

CA-34

CA-40

CA-44

FL-10

FL-14

FL-20

FL-21

FL-24

GA-5

LA-2

MA-1

MA-4

MA-7

MA-8

MI-13

MS-2

NY-5

NY-6

NY-7

NY-8

NY-16

NY-17

PA-18

TX-9

TX-20

TX-28

TX-30

VA-3

WA-2

WA-9

WI-2.

Democrats meanwhile abandoned the field in just four districts:

AK-1

CA-8

GA-8

NC-3.

Like lotto, you gotta be in it to win it.

It also helps to have a message.

Do Republicans have one anymore, except more freedom?

You know, freedom to ship your jobs overseas where the labor is cheaper and safety, health, and environmental regulation is next to nonexistent, freedom to cut the taxes of the businesses that won't give you a job, freedom to spend your tax dollars on defense of "US interests" abroad which are really the interests of those businesses not yours, freedom to keep bringing in millions of cheaper laborers to compete for your jobs and drive down your wages, and freedom to keep charging 4.45% for federal students loans in a 2.49% 10-yr note economy.

Yes, we need freedom all right. Freedom from Republicans.

Unfortunately that means Democrats.

Which is why we are well and truly screwed.

Did Billy Cunningham discuss Trump's immigration cave last night?

If he did I must have missed it. It wasn't in the first hour.

Expect nothing but spin from conservative talk radio on this, if they talk about it at all.

Everywhere I turn it's the bleating sheeple of MAGA, even as the Trumpster has been completely co-opted by the Swamp, on Obamacare, taxes and spending, and now immigration, his so-called priority issue.

Simply voting Republican will not do under these circumstances. Elected Republican officials either go along to get along, or they do the right thing and stop spending us blind. You can only vote for individuals who do the latter and call yourself a true born son of liberty.

The direct result of spending money we do not have is an exploding debt which must be serviced. To get away with this they must continue to suppress the natural rate of interest to keep the payments on the debt from exploding and tying our hands on the annual budget, crowding out spending on legitimate items. That's already happening, as interest payments soared to $523 billion in fiscal 2018, up 14% from 2017. The consequence of that reverberates throughout the economy, making it unattractive for anyone to lend, and that means poor economic growth with the knock-on effect of the fixed income side in every portfolio returning less and less to retirement portfolios, pension funds, insurance companies, lotteries, you name it.

In other words, more of the same shitty Obama economy we elected Trump to fix. It ain't happening.

You can put lipstick on this pig all you want. I ain't askin' her to dance. 

One ticket in Illinois won the $393 million Megamillions jackpot on Friday . . .

That's 2.6% of Illinois' unpaid bills totaling $15 billion.

Good luck collecting, buddy.

You'd better pray I don't win Megamillions tonight

With my luck I'll win and a nuclear war will start with North Korea.

Governments often raised funds with lotteries in the past, but how about $7 trillion in FY2017?

I don't think so.

Lotteries started to fall out of favor after 1830, according to the story here, mostly due to corruption. The guys running the things would run off with the dough. So much for the golden age of the past.

Government at all levels in the US will shell out $7.04 trillion in fiscal 2017, 36.5% of GDP.

In 1817 the number was in the neighborhood of $23 million, about 3% of GDP.

The problem with raising revenues today is only a problem because government is too damn big. Spending 3% of GDP today on government at all levels compared with current outlays means they are twelve times the size they should be, $7 trillion instead of $0.6 trillion.

Besides, you couldn't possibly raise enough using lotteries. In fiscal 2014 lottery revenues countrywide barely totaled $70 billion, just 1% of current total outlays.

Every man, woman and child in this country would have to purchase at least $21,757 in lotto tickets this fiscal year in order to fund government at all levels. And that's before any jackpots are paid out, or lottery workers paid.

Or we could just tax everyone that much.

It would be easier and fairer, right?

After all, we're all "equal".

Except 60 million Americans don't make even that much. If government took it all what would they live on?

Hope, no doubt.

The unending fascination of Sarah Palin for little Democrat minds

Dunderhead Democrat Party hack William Daley is stuck on stupid.

Here he is in full flutter in WaPo, like a moth drawn to a lightbulb, typing "The GOP’s dysfunction all started with Sarah Palin". It proves nothing but that it takes a dunderhead to know a dunderhead. The GOP has failed, he says, to distance itself from this simpleton who flunked Newspapers 101, and her ilk. Reading it one wonders when Democrats will distance themselves from ignoramuses like Bill Daley, but then you realize they're all ignoramuses. Where would they go?

Certainly not Chicago.  

Bill Daley, it must remembered, comes from the same Democrat family which presided over the decades long ruination of the finances of that once great city, and with it of the state. The place is now so bankrupt it can't even pay lottery winners. Those who can flee the state, do. Illinois ranks first in America for out-migration in 2014. These nincompoop Daleys are the same people who seriously thought they could afford to host the Summer Olympics next year, forgetting how all those $100,000+ pensions for unionized teachers can really add up. As it is Chicago's bonds have this year achieved junk status, despite the highest sales taxes in the nation and the highest property taxes of any state, save New Jersey. The place is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because of perennially spendthrift Democrats.

In charge of the Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton, Bill Daley long ago proved his own incompetence. The man couldn't even manage to find a staffer at the Bureau of Economic Analysis to give him the correct figure for year 1900 gross domestic product in a 1999 speech commemorating the invention of the metric under FDR. Daley was only off by an order of magnitude and fifty years at the time, saying the year 1900 $20 billion economy was actually $300 billion in size, a level which it did not reach . . . until 1950! Bill Daley only ran the place. You'd think he could at least get its monthly claim to headline fame right.

But Democrats have good reason to forget the size of things, especially GDP. After all under them it took eleven long years to restore the 1929 $100 billion economy back to its size, in 1940. And presently the chief Democrat holding a veto pen in one hand and a copy of Rules for Radicals in the other is on schedule to produce the very worst GDP record since that Great Depression.

At least Sarah Palin has learned a few things along the way since her quixotic candidacy, for example rejecting the appropriateness of bailouts and crony capitalism. Democrats on the other hand have learned nothing, and only keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

The Odds Of Winning Lotto Are About 20% Better Than Your Congressman Knowing Your Name

In Michigan your best odds of winning a lotto jackpot are in the game named "Fantasy Five". Your odds of winning are about 1:575,757.

The likelihood your congressman knows your name on average in the United States today are 1:728,712 (316.99 million current population divided by 435 members of the US House).

So your lotto odds are about 20% better than your representation odds.

If we followed the constitution, however, and had the representation it prescribes (1:30,000), your representation odds would improve almost 96% instantly (10,566 members of the US House).

Now there's an instant game we can all play.

Food Stamps in Michigan: 30K College Students Removed From Program

Who knew? Apparently that number on the program was huge, 10 times more than in other states.

New rules for eligibility are coming, requiring assets to be counted. Like lotto winnings.

The Detroit News has the story here:

Even after the recent removal of 30,000 college students from the food stamp program, close to 2 million Michigan residents — one in five — are on the program, [Brian] Rooney [Deputy Director, Department of Human Services] said.

A Housing Lotto?

Reuven Brenner for Forbes thinks a lottery might be the solution to the foreclosure and shadow inventory mess. He got the idea from Thomas Jefferson:

Shortly before Thomas Jefferson died, he tried to pay debts that amounted to $80,000 by disposing of land he owned through the use of a lottery, a well-established method at the time. He explained the rationale for such financing: "An article of property, insusceptible of division at all, or not without great diminution of its worth, is sometimes of so large value that no purchaser can be found ... The lottery is here a salutary instrument for disposing of it, where men run small risks for a chance of obtaining a high prize."

Go here to read how Brenner thinks it could be made to work.

The Desperation Index: Bull Market in Lotto Tickets and Metal Detectors

BusinessWeek.com is reporting here that lotto ticket sales increased 1.5% in the fiscal year just ended, making the North American lottery business larger than $70 billion. Metal detector sales have also jumped.

Follow the link for the whole story.