Maryland really wants you to play the lottery

I've spent a bit of time in Maryland and maybe I was just in the wrong parts of the state, but to my eyes that place seemed exceptionally poor and dangerous. There seems to be a genuine lack of money in the urban areas and poverty seems quite widespread.

But everyone already knows apparently, that the best way to get out of a poverty cycle isn't education or working, the best way to get out of that is to play and win the lottery. According to the propaganda disguised as real news, almost everyone in Maryland wins the lottery as well.

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These stories that pop up on news sites regularly are clearly paid ads for gambling although they don't call it that. This is because advertising for gambling, even state lottery in Maryland, isn't allowed in many ways. So what better way to circumvent this law than to put very vague stories of winning out there that includes no names of winners, roundabout location information that could be anywhere, and make all of the stories a feel-good story that could be a "YOU" story if only you would just play the lottery like a good little slave.

I've noticed a lot of these ads popping up about two states very frequently, Maryland and South Carolina

In both of these states the advertising of the lottery is "Strictly regulated" but when the government is in charge of policing itself we shouldn't be all that surprised when they continually get away with something that if you were to do it, you would go to jail.

Advertisements for lottery in Maryland have to be approved by the Maryland State Lottery, which I find hilarious and corrupt as fuck because are they ever going to NOT approve an ad that they created? Who is doing advertisements for the Maryland Lottery other than they themselves?

This particular "definitely not an ad" advertisement news story talks about how a random guy who is not named won the lottery by playing his old zip code numbers. I looked the numbers up on the required Maryland lottery results page and unless this story is about some shit that happened years ago, the winning lottery numbers they talk about haven't been the winning lottery numbers.

They aren't even trying very hard to conceal their lies because whose going to bust them? Themselves? Doesn't seem likely.

These stories always end the same way by describing what the winner plans to do with the winnings and it is always something virtuous such as investing, paying for college, or remodeling a kitchen. It's never booze, drugs and hookers and honestly if they were to say that I would believe the article was real.

Let it be known though that if you actually did win $50,000 in the Maryland lottery you would only get to keep about $30,000 of it. The rest would go back to the government, the very same government that sold you the lottery ticket, in the form of taxes. It's really a fantastic con, one of the best ever made.

I'd like to think that people are getting more wise and not playing the lottery anymore and that is why Maryland is pushing this so hard in their fake news stories.

They conceal this information by including a bunch of prizes that don't mean anything like a "free ticket" but the odds of you winning the pick-5, like the one featured in the story, is about 1 in 1.5 million. Don't be a fool. Don't play the lottery no matter how many feel good stories the government tries to flash at you in the form of fake news stories.