Congressional Spending and the Powerball

Letter to the Editor

Here’s a Letter to the Editor that I sent the Washington Post a week or so ago. I’ve also got a longer article at The Daily Economy based on this coming out soon.

Dear Editor:

The $1.8 billion Powerball jackpot made headlines as one of the largest lottery prizes in history. For us mere fiscal mortals, this would be an unimaginable windfall. But when measured against Congressional spending levels, it looks modest at best.

Consider what Congress could do with the winnings, based on spending figures for FY2025. The Pentagon, with a budget of $859 billion, would spend through the winnings in just 18 hours and 36 minutes. Social Security’s $1.57 trillion price tag would burn through the winnings in barely 10 hours. Medicare and Medicaid combined would run out of winnings to spend in nine hours flat.

The federal government’s $7.03 trillion budget means Congress spends the equivalent of the Powerball winnings every 2 hours and 15 minutes around the clock, every day of the year. To fund just one day of federal operations, Congress would need to hit the jackpot ten times.

Most sobering: this year’s federal deficit of $1.9 trillion alone equals more than 1,000 Powerball jackpots combined. At three drawings per week, our Congressional leaders would need to win a $1.8 billion jackpot for the next six and a half years just to pay for this year’s excess spending. And this would not touch a single penny of our $37.4 trillion national debt.

The next time policymakers bring up a new tax scheme they claim will get us back on a pathway to fiscal sanity, remember this fact: winning a $1.8 billion jackpot every single day for a year would bring in over twice as much revenue as President Trump’s tariffs are projected to raise.

The simple reality is that we cannot tax our way out of a spending crisis. When winning one of history’s largest lottery jackpots every single day still would not fill our gaping fiscal hole, the problem is not the shovel, but the size of the hole we keep digging. Real solutions require real limits on federal spending, automatic triggers that force spending cuts rather than hollow debates that ultimately raise the debt ceiling, and entitlement reforms that acknowledge both demographic and fiscal reality. Until then, we should expect that Congress will keep hitting the taxpayer jackpot every 2 hours and 15 minutes.