https://medium.com/@tomwhitwell/52-things-i-learned-in-2025-edeca7e3fdd8
{tip of the old tin foil hat to Tom Whitwell for the lead!}
52 things I learned in 2025
Tom Whitwell
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Every receipt for every purchase in Taiwan includes a lottery number worth up to £250k. It’s a tax compliance scheme with benefits. [Pablo Musumeci]
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https://www.pablomusumeci.com/p/taiwans-receipt-lottery-the-genius
{tip of the old tin foil hat to Pablo Musumeci for the idea!}
Taiwan’s Receipt Lottery: The Genius Tax Trick on Desperation
- Gambling is illegal in Taiwan. And yet, every receipt is a lottery ticket. Here’s what it taught me about luck, dreams, and the price we pay for hope.
Pablo Musumeci
Feb 03, 2025
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I buy a black tea at 7-Eleven, grab my receipt, and instinctively crumple it into a ball. To me, it’s trash. But in Taiwan, even trash can be worth a fortune.
The cashier stops me. “Wait,” she says, pointing at the numbers printed at the top. “Maybe lucky.”
Turns out, every receipt here is a ticket for the tǒngyī fāpiào, the bimonthly national lottery. But this isn’t just a game, it’s a tax system in disguise. Businesses must issue receipts to prevent under-the-table deals. To ensure customers actually demand them, the government adds an incentive: every receipt could be a winning ticket.
It’s genius. And strange. Gambling is illegal in Taiwan, yet the government runs its own lottery. Funded by the very taxes it’s designed to collect, it’s a perfect loop: sell hope to the poor, then use their losses to build the roads they’ll keep driving to dead-end jobs—with neatly folded receipts in their pockets.
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As much as I think “taxes are theft” and that “tax evasion” is a problem, I can’t let a “good idea” be a complete enemy of my idea of the “perfect society”. (That would an completely voluntary Anarcho-capitalist State.)
“What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social justice.” — Thomas Sowell
Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. — attributed to Voltaire 1770
(Literal translation: The best is the enemy of the good. Better translation: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Variant translation: The better is the enemy of the good. Better known translation: The perfect is the enemy of the good.)
So until the USA becomes what I see as Utopia, this would be an excellent compromise along the way to being the “shining city on the hill”.
The various Gooferments run lotteries now. Why not one like this that has minimal cost to society and might even be fun!
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Posted by reinkefj 
Reinke Faces Life 