The math is way off. Divided among 300 million Americans, the $1.2 billion Powerball jackpot, even before taxes and the cut taking it as lump sum (as most people do) comes with, would amount to just $4.00 per person, not $4 million. That’s not a minor error, it’s off by six orders of magnitude. And it’s not an uncommon one. Snopes.com brought up a similar meme from last year, which I remember seeing, that thought $317 million of Obamacare spending was enough to just give every American about $1 million each.
How much would it actually take for the government to “give” every American a million dollars? $300 trillion. If the government spends about $4 trillion a year, it would take 75 years of federal spending to give every American alive today $1 million. By then there would be millions if not a billion more Americans.
There’s a relevant Richard Feynman quotes about big numbers. “There are 1011 stars in the galaxy,” Feynman once said. “That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” That was at least three decades ago—the annual deficit is at about a trillion now.