Powerball changes

As I write this week’s blog entry, the Powerball jackpot for Wednesday night is $284 million dollars. It may even climb higher than that considering how many tickets will be sold in the last few hours. That is an incredible amount of money that would change anyone’s life, and hopefully it will be split among a few different winning ticket holders. But maybe not, it could be simply one ticket holder that receives all of that money.

The Powerball rules currently state that someone match 5 numbers from a pool of numbers from 1 to 59, and also match one Powerball from a separate pool of numbers from 1 to 35. This is obviously very rare, and the current odds to match all 5 plus the Powerball are 1 in 175 million. The reason the jackpot is so large is because no one has achieved this in the last 13 drawings.

So, my opinion is: why not change the rules a little when the jackpot gets that big? A jackpot over $200 million is an incredible sum of money for only one person. It doesn’t have to turn someone into a mogul, and a lower jackpot can still set a person up for many years to come. After all, this is money that you won from luck. It’s not exactly as though you earned it.

My proposal is to drop the Powerball requirement from the first drawing that reaches $250 million dollars. Any and all players who match 5 numbers in the next drawing would split the jackpot. For example, in Saturday’s $250 million drawing, 10 players matched 5 numbers, but failed to match the Powerball. That means under my proposal, those 10 people would have split $250 million, and receive $25 million apiece. That is certainly a large amount of money for anyone, and it could benefit at least 10 potential families.

I understand that lottery officials may resist this type of change because they receive considerable publicity from the large jackpots, but 10 or more millionaires could generate quite the buzz as well. Saturday’s winners were from California, New York, New Jersey, Colorado, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Texas. That could generate substantial goodwill in all the areas where the winners reside. I just feel that in these economic times it would show great compassion to sacrifice the huge jackpot to have more people benefit from the money.