Spain does it right on a big lottery

If nations must have lotteries--and apparently they must--it seems Spain does it a bit smarter:

Spain's 'El Nino' lottery hands out $1.1 billion

Sure, they handed out a load of money, but instead of just giving it to one winner, they distribute it:

MADRID (AP) — A lottery showered €840 million ($1.1 billion) on ticket holders in five regions of Spain on Sunday, in the midst of a deep recession and high unemployment.

 

The "El Nino" (The Child) lottery is held each Feast of the Epiphany — Jan. 6 — and the top prize tickets were sold in Alicante, Leon, Madrid, Murcia and Tenerife. The lottery's name refers to the baby Jesus, who according to tradition was visited this day by three kings of Orient bearing gifts.

 

The lottery tickets cost €20 ($26), and the most one can win is €200,000 ($260,240). But there's a catch. Thanks to new austerity measures aimed at reviving Spain's ailing economy, anyone who wins above 2,500 euros ($3,250) in the lottery has to pay 20 percent income tax on their windfall.

On Sunday, a cheering crowd gathered outside one ticket office in the southwestern Madrid suburb of Alcorcon where 200 of the winning numbers were sold, totaling €40 million ($52 million) in prize money.

I've written about this before, not that long ago.  Distributing lotteries, if we're going to have them, between more people could and should and would benefit from them, they would be far less likely to get or be really screwed up by such a large windfall of money and, finally, the benefit of the wins would be distributed across more economies, more towns, more cities, more counties and states.

It only makes sense.