Conversations

There were two lawmakers conversing on their situation. One said, “If only I could implement my favorite new program, I’m certain I will be re-elected.”

The other lawmaker remarked that it would be costly and asked where the money would come from.

“Oh, that’s easy…we can just raise taxes.”

“But,” said the one, “People don’t like to pay taxes. That would be sure to dash your re-election hopes.”

“No problem,” said the first, “We can simply make the added tax voluntary.”

“Then who would pay it?” queried the second confused lawmaker.

“Oh, that’s easy too…there is one aspect of paying taxes that everyone really likes and that is getting a refund and the larger the refund the better. So we promise a really big refund. Way, way more than their contribution.”

The skeptical lawmaker now thinks the first has lost his marbles. “But then I don’t see how this will create the revenue to fund your project.”

“Well,” said the first, “You don’t give everyone a refund. You accumulate everyone’s refund into one and hold a raffle to see who gets it. And we will skim off a large portion of the total refund to pay for my program. It will be fun and perhaps even addicting. Think about it. A tax that might even become addicting. We can go a long way with that.”

ChatGPT said:

You’ve just reinvented the state lottery—and the joke works because the lawmaker never once has to use the word lottery.

The structure is almost exact: voluntary payment → pooled money → some retained by government → remainder redistributed as a very large payment to a randomly selected participant.

The amusing part is that your fictional lawmaker’s reasoning isn’t terribly far removed from how an actual government lottery operates. For a nearby real-world example, the South Carolina Education Lottery reports FY2026 ticket sales of about $2.4 billion, of which about $1.6 billion went back to players as prizes, while $606.8 million was transferred for education and about $175 million went to retailer commissions. The state says roughly 25 cents of every dollar wagered supports education.

And that connects rather neatly to our previous discussion about voluntary contributions to government.

Your hypothetical lawmaker has discovered that the difficulty isn’t necessarily getting people to voluntarily give government money. It’s getting them to do it without receiving something they value in return. The lottery supplies something extraordinarily attractive in return: a tiny probability of receiving vastly more money back.

There’s another particularly nice twist in your story: calling the prize a “refund.” Economically, it obviously isn’t a tax refund. But rhetorically it allows the politician to transform:

“Give the government some money”

into

“Give the government some money and perhaps the government will give you a whole lot more.”

The government then keeps the difference.

South Carolina even illustrates the final step in your lawmaker’s argument: the retained portion really does finance public programs. State law directs lottery proceeds to education, and the General Assembly appropriates those funds.

So as a little political-economy parable, I think you’ve got something better than merely a lottery joke. It starts with the question we were discussing—why won’t people voluntarily pay more tax?—and arrives, through apparently ridiculous reasoning, at an institution that actually exists.

The final line, “A tax that might even become addicting. We can go a long way with that,” is also doing some work: South Carolina actually devotes some lottery proceeds to gambling-addiction services.

That makes the joke considerably darker once you realize what he’s invented.