Spanish Lottery Awards 3 Billion to Thousands of Lucky Winners

In Spain, the lottery system works a little bit differently. Rather than a system set up to reward only a handful of winners with outrageous sums, the Spanish lottery is designed to create thousands of winners, each receiving significant sums.

1,950 people held the ticket numbers that awarded them the grand prize, which is the equivalent of about $400,000 - not too shabby for a splitting the purse with nearly two thousand other people. The announcement of the lottery winners, an annual event that captivates the entire nation, resulted in widespread jubilation and parties as thousands of people realized that they had just won huge sums of money.

Roughly 70% of the lottery's overall take in ticket purchases goes back out in prize money. The remainder goes to the state as a passive tax on its citizens. The Spanish lottery has been in existence since 1763, when it was instituted as a public charity. Over the centuries, it has evolved into a planned revenue generator for Spain.

Even in these troubled economic times, the purchase of lottery tickets was only down about 1 euro per capita across the country. The per capita expenditures for the lottery this year was roughly 62 euros, or 92 dollars. That is an incredible amount of money for people to be spending on a national lottery, but given the structure of the payouts, it's easy to understand why people would want to give it a shot. As people in the U.S. become more familiar with this lottery system, I would expect to see it take hold here as well. People love to gamble, and if you're going to increase their odds of winning, they're likely to gamble more.