A lucky person who bought a ticket in Arkansas will take home a whopping $1.817 billion Powerball jackpot, which has a cash option of $834.9 million.
The Christmas Eve prize is the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won and the largest Powerball prize this year, according to a news release from the Multi-State Lottery Association.
Billionaires don’t have that much in cash, it’s (mostly and usually) unrealized gains from ownership of stock, which they use as collateral for loans. If you wanted to tax the “assets” of billionaires, you would have to tax unrealized gains on stocks, which would absolutely fuck every person with an investment account, IRA, 401k, 403b, etc. Or you would have to tax loans, which would fuck anyone with a mortgage, or a car, or … you get the point.
It’s not as easy as “tax the billionaires”
Edit to add: as far as the lotto goes, if you take the cash option you only get half the jackpot. And then 35-ish percent goes to the IRS under the “gift” tax (iirc). If you take the “equal payments over 20 years” option, you get the full jackpot split over 20 years but pay the 35% each year and also lose out on 20 years of investment growth. So even though you only end up getting like 40% of the jackpot with the cash option, you come out ahead over the long run