What’s that you say? You needed a moment to yourself when you:
A. realized you weren't going to be a Billionaire, and
B. had spent maybe ridiculous amounts of your hard earned money on a miniscule chance you could quit your job and live the lifestyle of the rich and famous?
Well, you'll have another chance to become a millionaire Friday night.The mega millions jackpot is 40 million dollars. Saturday's Powerball up to 750 million.
As the prizes increase, more people are buying tickets. In case you haven’t heard, your $2 Mega Millions ticket had a 1 in 300 million chance of being the winning ticket.
Which meant you were 3 times more likely to be killed by a vending machine.
But for many, that doesn't matter.
So, we wondered where do lottery profits really go?
Bigger and bigger jackpots should mean more state tax dollars to spend on public services like education.
But that’s not happening, according to Liberty Vitterta, a visiting assistant professor in statistics at Washington University, in St. Louis.
The lottery, she points out, was promoted as a way to create more money for education. But Vitterta found that most state legislatures haven't been using the money as additional funding.
Instead, it helps pay for their education budget, allowing the states to spend the money that would have been used on education on other things.
As a result, she found public schools in some states rarely get a budget boost in what Vitterta calls " a pretty darn big bait and switch"
In Ohio, according to the lottery web page, more than a billion dollars went to the Lottery Profits Education Fund for use by primary and secondary schools in Ohio in 2016.
In total, the Ohio lottery has provided $23 billion in cumulative profits to the state for education since it started.
So where does the rest of the the lottery's money go?
According to its website, $1.9 Billion was paid out to winning ticket holders. Most of them, of course, were in Ohio.
The retailers selling those lottery tickets saw more than $188 million in bonuses and commissions.