I should explain the whole Moron Tax thing.
For those not aware, in the UK we have a national lottery (same as most countries, I gather.) You pays yer money, you picks yer numbers and you watches a dreadful television show to see if this week is your lucky week.
They call it gambling.
I disagree. Gambling to me equates to card games, betting and the like. Where there is a modicum of skill involved (as well as a chunk of luck.) A fool and his money are still, more often than not, parted with surgical precision. But at least the fool can have a chance of winning based on her or his skills.
The lottery requires no skill. In fact, the ticket machines will even pick the numbers for you. And with the number of games going, you have to buy a lot of tickets to participate in them all. So, you can end up spending a lot of money to make sure that your numbers are in all the draws over the week (after all, wouldn't it be awful if you didn't enter one of the draws and that was the one in which your numbers came up?)
And of course, the majority of the people who play the lottery can't really afford it (demographics, dahling). That £5 being spent a week on tickets could be spent on buying junior some books, but no. There's an infinitely small chance of winning a million, so out with the cash and on with the television.
And there is an alternative. I don't know about the rest of the world, but the UK has Premium Bonds. You put your money in (ok, the initial stake is bit higher), and every month there's a draw with various cash prizes. The difference is that this is a savings account. So maybe you might win, maybe not. But your stake sits in an account gaining a little bit of interest. So when its time for junior to go to college there'll be a nice big pile of cash for him to take with him, rather than a pile of discarded lottery tickets.
Hence Moron Tax.
Rant over.
