United States Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is a totally relatable guy. He went to Yale and then made hundreds of millions of dollars running hedge funds. Just another working class stiff trying to get through the week, am I right?
While speaking to The Associated Press last week, Bessent decided to lecture us plebeians about how we only have our own stupidity to blame for our financial insecurity. “There are a lot of young people, mostly young men, going to blue-collar construction jobs, playing the lottery,” said Bessent. “It drives me crazy.”
Really? People playing the lottery is what drives you crazy about America’s economic system? Well, sh*t, here I thought maybe it was the corrupt billionaires plundering our democracy who had to shoulder some of the blame for nothing being affordable, but I guess we’d all be thriving capitalists like Bessent if only we could somehow resist our base urge to shell out two bucks for a Powerball ticket in order to daydream for five minutes about having a life in which needing to pay for a dental appointment didn’t mean seven straight meals of ramen.
“The best thing you can do is not play the lottery,” Bessent went on before finally getting to something that wasn’t so insultingly pedantic. Instead of playing the lottery, he advised people to invest and “then watch it grow.”
Now, no one is a stronger advocate than me for regular people saving and investing wisely in low-cost index funds, in particular if you are holding these types of mutual funds in a tax advantaged Roth retirement account. In fact, one of my very first Above the Law columns nearly eight years ago was about this very subject.
However, I hate to break it to you ladies and gentlemen, but if your choice is a two-dollar Powerball ticket per week or investing those two dollars in the stock market, it’s really no choice at all. Two dollars per week is a functionally meaningless amount of money to invest. Congratulations, by saving $104 per year your portfolio will grow big enough to be wiped out by paying for the first doctor’s visit of your retirement. Just buy the damn lottery ticket.
Obviously people should save for the future and invest in a way that will result in the highest returns possible at a minimum of expense. That being said, Bessent’s comments about the lottery don’t have any connection to this.
I suppose there are a few people out there who really are spending thousands of dollars a year on the lottery. If you are one of those people, I sincerely doubt you’re reading my column, but just in case one of you squeaked in somehow, yeah, get some help for your gambling addiction, you degenerate, and stop throwing your money away.
For everyone else, an occasional lottery ticket is harmless and is a fun little escape from reality. For that purpose, it’s a bargain too. Two dollars is a small price to pay in return for license to fantasize for a few fleeting moments about what it might be like to be perhaps almost half as rich as Scott Bessent.
What else are you realistically going to spend those two dollars on? Like a quarter of a delicious Starbucks white chocolate mocha that’s going to slowly give you diabetes?
The IRA contribution limit for 2026 is $7,500. If you’re already well-off enough to be meeting that cap (or contributing the equivalent to some other form of retirement account), playing the lottery now and then is not going to change that. On the other hand, if you are not currently saving anything at all for retirement, giving up on the lottery is also not going to change that.
No one in the real world is choosing between adequately funding a brokerage account and playing the lottery. I guess it makes sense though that, as someone who won the lottery of life, Bessent wouldn’t understand people in the real world.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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