✦ What Would You Do If You Won the Last Powerball? ✦

What would you do if you won the last Powerball, the one that hit $1.8 billion? Lump sum wise, after state and federal taxes, you’d walk away with about $600 million-ish in your pocket.

That’s the question I asked myself. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I Did the Math

I spent weeks calculating, running models, sketching plans. How do you take $600 million and not just get rich… but get so rich that you could actually do whatever you wanted, even invest in our own country’s future?

I broke it down into trusts. I looked at 15-year vs. 30-year returns. I built out rail systems, renewable energy farms, land lease programs, schools, and health centers on paper.

And somewhere in the middle of all that math, or should I say greedy dreams, I realized something:

Why Should a Lottery Winner Dream Bigger Than Our Government?

If one person could take $600 million and, through patient investment, turn it into billions that rebuild schools, electrify transit, and create generational security…Then why is our government burning through hundreds of billions every year on endless wars overseas? 

Think about it: the U.S. has sent tens of billions to Israel alone in the past few decades. Add Iraq, Afghanistan, bases in 80+ countries. Trillions, gone. With national debt still on the rise.

What if just a fraction of that had been invested here, in us?

The Society We Could Already Have 

By now, we could be living in a completely different America:

• High-speed rail connecting major cities.
• Renewable energy powering every home and business. 
• Schools and hospitals, fully funded. 
• Contractors building for growth, not destruction. 
• A society so self-sufficient, so technologically advanced, there’d be less need for war in the first place.

Instead, we have potholes, debt, and another round of “tighten your belt” speeches while our tax dollars fund foreign conflicts.

The Big Question 

So I keep coming back to it: Why should we accept that a lottery winner can imagine fixing the country, but our own government can’t?

Maybe it’s not that they can’t. 

Maybe it’s that they won’t.

I don’t need to win the lottery to know this: the money exists. The math works. The future is possible. The only thing missing is the will to invest in us.

Rant Done. 

Now Here’s the Math If you’re wondering how much money you’d have in 60 years if you had $600 million at 7% compound interest? It’d supposedly be around $34.8 Billion.

Ask ChatGPT or your financial planner, I’m no expert, I just went down the rabbit hole of, “what if I stuck Powerball winnings in trusts and hired the same financial/legal teams rich people use?”

Where It Started… 

Honestly, I just wanted to know if it’d be possible to create a self-sustainable college. (My family would already be generationally set, so I wasn’t worried about that part.) But then I wanted the college to be located between two major cities, connected by an electric speed rail like we see in other countries.

And then I spiraled into:

• Why the hell don’t we have electric speed rails across the U.S.? 
• Why aren’t universities built to be self-sustaining so students don’t have to pay tuition, housing, or meal plans?

…And Where It Ended

I don’t know about you, but:

• I don’t like that it takes 30+ hours to drive coast-to-coast.
• I don’t like being stuck in a plane for 7–12 hours for the same trip.
• I  don’t understand how education drifted from low-cost in-state schools to generational debt factories, and “this is totally acceptable in the modern world”.

Our society would be so different if we invested in our own universities, our own students, and our own future.

The money exists. The math works. The future is possible. The only thing missing is the will.

Or maybe it’s something even harder to face: maybe we all just stopped focusing on the American Dream.

Now I’ll Ask You What would you do if you had $600 million? How would you invest it? Would you hoard it? Would you go into hiding? What would you build? What would you change in our society? 

And second line of questioning: How do you feel about Powerball in general? It was quite shocking to me how $1.8 Billion is reduced down to $600 Million-ish by the time taxes are all paid/ taken out. 

No need to rail into my pipe dream, no I didn’t win the Powerball, unfortunately. I know too bad, so sad. I do wonder what the two winners will do with their money though.

The financial freedom and unburdening that comes with a million dollar win alone must feel freeing.