Rain and snow from El Nino are filling reservoirs in the West. But the weather isn’t ending questions about where cities will get water in years to come. One source could be Native American tribes.
Transcript
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Rain and snow from El Nino are filling reservoirs in the West this season, but that doesn’t end questions about where cities will get water in years to come. One source could be Native American tribes, as Will Stone of member station KJZZ reports.
WILL STONE, BYLINE: When settlers dammed the Gila River in the 1800s, the way of life for one of the South’s most enduring agricultural societies began to unravel.
DAVID DEJONG: It literally took the entire flow of the river.
STONE: David DeJong runs this construction project that will eventually carry water to growers across the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix.
DEJONG: In fact, there are recorded documents that indicate some of the off-reservation farmers intentionally wasted the water so that there would be no water down here on the reservation.
STONE: The river was woven into the tribe’s very identity, says DeJong.
DEJONG: In their own language, these are the Akimel O’odham, the river people.
STONE: Next to him, an irrigation canal empties water into the dry riverbed. It represents years of negotiations that resulted in a water settlement just over a decade ago, the largest in U.S. history at the time. And now the tribe is finally seeing the benefits. DeJong says soon, they expect the trees and wildlife that once lived along the river to return. And –
DEJONG: As importantly, the community is recharging water for future use.
STONE: Once water has seeped into the aquifer below, the community can then sell that valuable resource as credits to central Arizona cities.
STEPHEN ROE LEWIS: We’re really at a crossroads with our water settlement.
STONE: Stephen Roe Lewis is governor of the Gila River Indian Community. They’re entitled to more water from the parched Colorado River than anyone else in the region, but they still have to pay for it and the infrastructure. That’s expensive, so they’ve banded with a nearby utility to sell some of this banked water.
LEWIS: The marketing of our water credits and leasing, that’s going to be critical to the ongoing water supply in the future. That’s really going to be a driving economic force.
STONE: In other words, the committee pipes in the water, stores it up, and then sells it locally. Lewis believes the tribes will be major players in the water market in coming years. Like everyone, though, they are still subject to the realities of a water-stretched West. Daniel McCool is a professor at the University of Utah, and has authored books on the subject.
DANIEL MCCOOL: The tribes negotiated their settlement in this context of a Western water policy that’s really coming to an end.
STONE: Some western tribes have access to large supplies thanks to settlements. But with sources like the Colorado River over-allocated, he says some may be forced to renegotiate. As part of its settlement, the Gila River community already accepted certain restrictions on the marketing of water.
MCCOOL: A lot of people just hated the idea that a tribe might get a quantified amount of water and then open that up to the highest bidder because it would be western cities.
STONE: So water can only go to cities in Arizona, not, say, to Las Vegas or LA. Still, McCool believes their settlement was overall favorable. And ultimately, the tribe’s business plan is in the service of a greater cause, reviving the agrarian and cultural roots for the next generation – young farmers on the reservation like Cimarron Cabello and his wife, who inherited a modest plot of windswept desert.
CIMARRON CABELLO: We’re just trying to bring it back, I guess. Like the water’s coming back for the Gila River, we’ve got to bring the farming back and all.
STONE: In a year, they hope to have it in full production and more land on the way. That’s exactly what tribal governor Stephen Roe Lewis envisions as the Gila flows again.
LEWIS: When you actually can smell and taste the water firsthand, that shows that our sacred water is back and that we have a bright future ahead of us.
STONE: An economic reawakening on the reservation is what Lewis hopes for, fed by ancient traditions and a new entrepreneurial spirit. For NPR News, I’m Will Stone at the Gila River Indian Community.
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A day after many sanctions on Iran were lifted under the international nuclear pact, the U.S. Treasury department has imposed new sanctions — over Iran’s ballistic, not nuclear, weapons.
The sanctions target 11 companies and individuals who have been involved in procuring goods for Iran’s weapons program, the Treasury Department says.
“This action is consistent with the U.S. government’s commitment to continue targeting those who assist in Iran’s efforts to procure items for its ballistic missile program,” the department said in a statement.
It also comes one day after “Implementation Day,” when the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog verified that Iran has worked to shrink its nuclear program and opened it up for inspection. That meant that, under the terms of the international nuclear pact, many sanctions against Iran were lifted.
Not all sanctions were ended. As the White House noted in its summary of the nuclear deal, “U.S. statutory sanctions focused on Iran’s support for terrorism, human rights abuses, and missile activities will remain in effect and continue to be enforced.”
The new sanctions by the Treasury department target those missile activities. They were prompted by Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests, President Obama said Sunday.
Iran and the U.S. disagree over whether such penalties violate the nuclear accord, as the Wall Street Journal wrote last week, when it reported the U.S. was planning such sanctions:
“Iranian officials have warned the White House in recent months that any such financial penalties would be viewed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a violation of the nuclear accord.
Senior U.S. officials have said the Treasury retained a right under the agreement to blacklist Iranian entities allegedly involved in missile development, as well as those that support international terrorism and human-rights abuses. Officials view those activities as separate from the nuclear deal.”
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NPR’s Sonari Glinton tells Michel Martin about week one of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The North American International Auto Show opened to the public today in Detroit. It’s one of the biggest auto shows in America.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The 2016 North American Car of the Year is the Honda Civic.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The North American Truck Utility of the Year is the Volvo XC90.
MARTIN: Following a record year of auto sales, the big stories out of the show are luxury, trucks and car features that bring us closer to cars that drive themselves. NPR’s Sonari Glinton spent the week there, and he’s going to tell us more. Hi, Sonari.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Hey, how’s it going, Michel?
MARTIN: So the Honda Civic and the Volvo XC90 were the car and truck of the year, respectively. So let’s take them one by one – the Honda Civic, how come?
GLINTON: Well, it is actually a really amazing car. They have all the modern self-driving features that you can get in a really inexpensive vehicle. You can get Lane Assist, you can get a back-up camera, you can get all these sort of things for about $20,000, and that’s pretty amazing.
MARTIN: So are self-driving cars far away or not? We’ve heard so much about them, and it kind of make feel like they’re around the corner – yes or no?
GLINTON: Well, they’re around the corner and they’re far away. All the easy things – the driving down the road going 65 miles an hour, we can do that. What we can’t do is, you know, drive in an ice storm or figure out – is that a tumbleweed, is that a cat or is that a child? You know, there are these dynamic decisions that we have to make. And the car companies are spending billions of dollars right now on AI and robot technology. And that’s a part of the show, and that’s part of what everyone’s excited about because they’re actually putting the money in right now with the artificial intelligence. And you’re seeing it in the cars.
MARTIN: So now let’s talk trucks – the Volvo XC90 was the truck of the year. I’m not sure if that’s what people think of when they think of the truck. So tell me, first of all, why was it the truck of the year? What’s so great?
GLINTON: Well, you know, Volvo is a company that executes vehicles very well. It is an SUV. And SUVs are so important, as well as compact SUVs. This is where people are purchasing their cars. This is the playing ground. And the fact that a Chinese company, which owns Volvo, has spent about $11 billion restructuring the company is also a sign of a change in the structure of the auto industry, where a Chinese company has a seat on the floor of the North American International Auto Show. And that’s a sign of a change in the industry.
MARTIN: Finally, Sonari, your interview the head of Volkswagen has been getting a lot of play in the U.S. media. CEO Matthias Muller said, quote, “we didn’t lie.” And he was referring, of course, to VW’s emissions scandal. How are people receiving that?
GLINTON: Well, there’s a lot of shock, especially in Germany because there’s a sense and worry that he’s not the guy to handle this really big PR problem for Volkswagen. What we have to understand is that Volkswagen is much more central to the identity of Germany than, say, Chrysler is to ours. They employ hundreds of thousands of people. And this is really serious, and the German people and the German press and regulators are wondering if Matthias Muller can smooth this out. Now, he’s only been the CEO for three months, and there’s a worry that he’s not the person to get back the trust of the American people. And this is one of the most important markets for the company to win.
MARTIN: That NPR’s Sonari Glinton. He just got back from the Detroit Auto Show. Thanks, Sonari.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.
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Stocks on Wall Street and around the world fell on Friday as concerns about oil prices and the Chinese economy persisted. Spencer Platt/Getty Imageshide caption
toggle captionSpencer Platt/Getty Images
On Friday, Wall Street traders got the same treatment as the main character in The Revenant: A big fearsome bear attacked again and again.
By the close, stock prices were badly mauled. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 2.4 percent of its value, tumbling 391 points to close at 15,988.
The S&P 500 index dropped 2.16 percent to 1,880 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index lost 2.7 percent to 4,488.
Wall Street’s rough day started during the night, when investors in Asia and Europe began dumping shares. First, China’s Shanghai composite index plunged 3.6 percent, falling into bear-market territory — down 21 percent from a high in late December. Then Stoxx Europe 600 dropped 2.8 percent.
All of that selling was tied to the bad news for energy companies. Their troubles worsened as Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, fell to $29.05 a barrel. West Texas crude closed at $29.42. Those prices are stunning, considering that oil was selling for nearly $115 as recently as June 2014.
Oil and other commodity prices have been falling amid fears that China’s growth is slowing dramatically. A few years ago, China was gobbling up raw materials, such as iron ore, copper and coal. Now, as that country’s growth cools, it is buying far less of everything.
That’s hurting producer nations, especially in Africa, Latin America and even here in North America. So prices are way down for materials sold in bulk. And for oil, the problem has been made much worse by surging supplies. Iran is expected to soon flood the market with new oil exports.
And then other bad news piled on. A new report on the U.S. producer price index showed wholesale prices decreased 0.2 percent in December. And retail sales slipped 0.1 percent last month.
Intel Corp. added more gloom when it said its first-quarter sales would fall short of some forecasts. That knocked its stock price down 9 percent.
Investors are looking around and seeing energy companies laying off workers and currencies from commodity-producing countries in flux and questions being raised about weakness in manufacturing.
Such factors added to the pessimism, and this did not help: The U.S. stock market will be closed Monday for Martin Luther King Day. Traders typically get more jittery when they can’t sell shares while other global markets are doing business.
So people moved money away from stocks and into safer investments, such as U.S. Treasury securities. There were so many takers for the benchmark 10-year Treasury note that its yield slipped to a three-month low of 2.0295 percent.
Analysts scrambled to remind average investors that markets are volatile and that the U.S. economy has lots of strengths, including robust job growth, cheap gasoline and an improving housing sector.
Or as Hugh Glass, the much-mauled character put it in The Revenant: “Don’t give up, as long as you’ve got a breath in you.”
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Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, shown here at a September 2014 panel discussion, says he is pleased to resolve the allegations against the firm. Mark Lennihan/APhide caption
toggle captionMark Lennihan/AP
Goldman Sachs will pay about $5 billion to resolve state and federal investigations into its handling of mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, the bank said today.
The agreement will settle “actual and potential civil claims” by the U.S. Justice Department and the attorneys general of New York and Illinois, as well as the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle and the National Credit Union Administration, the firm said in a press release issued after the close of trading Thursday.
“We are pleased to have reached an agreement in principle to resolve these matters,” said Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive officer.
The firm said it will pay a civil monetary penalty of $2.385 billion, a cash payment of $875 million and $1.8 billion in consumer relief:
“The consumer relief will be in the form of principal forgiveness for underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers; financing for construction, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable housing; and support for debt restructuring, foreclosure prevention and housing quality improvement programs, as well as land banks.”
Goldman said the settlement, an agreement in principle, has not yet been finalized by the parties involved. If it is, it will reduce earnings for the last three months of 2013 by $1.5 billion.
Ever since the subprime mortgage crisis upended the global financial system, authorities have been investigating a number of large financial institutions and their sale of mortgage-backed securities.
The investigations have centered on whether the banks misrepresented the real value of the assets.
Regulators have already won large multibillion-dollar settlements from several large banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.
Last May, Goldman announced it was negotiating with federal and state authorities to resolve claims against it.
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Want to launder $20 million in illicit drug money? Buy a fancy penthouse in Miami with cash. It turns out secretively purchasing luxury real estate is a popular way for the world’s super-criminals to clean their dirty money.
“You can spend a lot of money to buy a house and sell it a year later,” says Heather Lowe, a lawyer with Global Financial Integrity. “All of a sudden, all that money is completely clean money.” Her group tracks the transfer of illicit money out of developing countries.
The Treasury Department has a new approach to step up oversight of such cash sales.
Drug kingpins from South America or organized crime figures from places like Russia — when they buy these luxury properties with cash, they set up “shell companies” to purchase them. So nobody knows who is actually buying that luxury penthouse overlooking Central Park in New York.
“That shell company might be owned by another shell company — might be a Panamanian shell company — which is owned by a Singapore trust,” Lowe says. She adds it’s often easy to conceal who is buying these properties. And she says, “That is a very common way to move illegal money and assets around the world.”
Now, at least in Manhattan and Miami-Dade County, Fla., during this temporary and exploratory phase of the program, the government will require that title insurance companies involved in real estate sales get the shell companies to reveal who are the actual owners of the shell companies. The title companies will then report that to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). That’s the plan. But will it work?
“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out through this process,” says Michelle Korsmo, the head of the American Land Title Association. She supports the effort. But she acknowledges that if a major drug kingpin is buying a mansion through a string of shell companies all over the world, that might be a bit much for a title insurance company to figure out. “We’re not sure we’re going to be able to get access to enough information,” she says. “But we’re going to give [the government] the information that we have.”
Heather Lowe says it would be a good thing if investigators get more information than they have now, even if it’s just loose bits that still need to be pieced together.
For its part, the National Association of Realtors is supporting the move by the Treasury Department as a “reasonable” approach to combat the problem of money laundering.
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The St. Louis Rams will be moving to Los Angeles. It will be the first NFL franchise in the city since the Rams and Raiders left the city two decades ago. Christopher Lee/The FA via Getty Imageshide caption
toggle captionChristopher Lee/The FA via Getty Images
After months of planning, maneuvering and dealing, NFL team owners have voted 30-2 in favor of relocating the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, while leaving open the option for the San Diego Chargers to share the facility.
Three teams — the Rams, the Chargers and the Oakland Raiders — have spent the past year vying to move to Los Angeles. Not only do the team owners say their stadiums are out of date, but they claim their current cities are unwilling to allocate enough public money to help build new ones. Plus, Los Angeles offers a much larger, greener media market than any of the other cities.
Ultimately, after a long day of presentations, debate and voting in a Houston hotel, Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s proposed $1.86 billion stadium in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, won 30 votes, surpassing the requisite 24-vote threshold. The funding for the Inglewood stadium will come from Kroenke and other private donors.
The approved plan also leaves room for the Chargers, owned by Dean Spanos, to share the stadium in Inglewood.
The compromise was struck after two previous plans failed to garner enough support. Kroenke’s plan to move the Rams alone to Inglewood fell short, as did the proposal from the Chargers’ Spanos and Raiders owner Mark Davis to build a shared stadium in Carson, Calif., another Los Angeles suburb.
The city of St. Louis had offered $150 million in public money to go toward a new $1.1 billion riverfront stadium, with the rest of the money coming from the state, team owner and NFL. In all, 40 percent of the stadium would have come from public money. Kroenke, however, was not satisfied with the deal, and the league evidently agreed with him. NFL rules stipulate against relocation if a viable stadium proposal has been presented in the team’s current city.
San Diego also had offered money for a new stadium to keep the Chargers in the city. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said: “The more San Diego has done the less engaged the Chargers have become. San Diegans deserve better.”
In fact, of the three teams, Oakland — unwilling to allocate more taxpayer money toward a stadium — was the only one not to offer the NFL a plan for financing a stadium in its current city.
The current deal gives the Chargers the ability to continue to negotiate with the city of San Diego for a more advantageous stadium-financing plan, while keeping the option of moving to the shared stadium in Inglewood. The other team owners also win, as it is expected that the moving teams will each pay a $550 million relocation fee. The real loser of the deal is the Raiders’ Davis, who is left with little leverage for a better stadium deal in Oakland.
Upon the Rams’ return to Los Angeles (they played in the area from 1946 to 1994), the team will play in a temporary facility until the new stadium is ready, most likely for the 2019 season.
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NPR’s Weekend in Washington session at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 31, 2015. Allison Shelley for NPRhide caption
toggle captionAllison Shelley for NPR
We don’t always act like we’re supposed to. We don’t save enough for retirement. We order dessert when we’re supposed to be dieting. We use the tickets we bought to a concert even though we’re sick. In other words: We misbehave.
That’s the title of Richard Thaler’s new book: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. If you’ve read Thaler’s previous book, Nudge, you know he’s is an economist who studies why people predictably don’t act the way traditional economists say they will.
Shankar Vedantam sat down with Thaler a few months ago for an event at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. This episode, we bring you the best parts from that conversation: They talk about why it’s so hard to find a cab on a rainy day, how marshmallows can predict the future and why where we get our money influences how we spend it.
The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Kara McGuirk-Alison and Maggie Penman. Max Nesterak is our News Assistant. Follow us on Twitter@hiddenbrain, @karamcguirk,@maggiepenman, and@maxnesteraklisten for Hidden Brain stories every week on your local public radio station.
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NPR’s Rachel Martin spoke with Brad Duke a few years ago about his $220 million lottery win in 2005. We called him back this week because numbers for the biggest Powerball jackpot were drawn Saturday.
Transcript
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Imagine it. You’re going about your life, and then – bam – you win the jackpot. Yesterday’s Powerball drawing reached almost $950 million. Now, of course, taxes can eat up about half of that. But come on, that’s still a whole lot of money. This record lottery made me think back to a conversation I had a couple years ago with Brad Duke. He won a $220 million Powerball jackpot in 2005. Brad Duke is a former exercise instructor from Star, Idaho. And in our conversation, he remembered that moment when he won.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BRAD DUKE: I had the ticket in a visor of a rental car at the time, and I had to stop and get fuel. I thought it would be a good time to check the tickets. So, I took the ticket in, let the gals behind the counter run the ticket through. And the machine made a bunch of weird noises, and they started jumping up and down and jumping in circles. And I was trying to actually pluck the ticket out of their hand ’cause my first instinct was just to kind of get out of there.
MARTIN: Here’s what happened next.
DUKE: I thought maybe that I had won 10 or 20 thousand, but I didn’t confirm it. I went on with my day just daydreaming of what I could do with five, 10, 15, 20 thousand, whatever it may be.
MARTIN: So, that’s day one, and it’s confirmed that you win. What happens a couple days later when you wake up and the reality of this really starts to sink in?
DUKE: You know, it didn’t sink in for a couple of days, you know, probably a couple of weeks. I knew the first thing that I wanted to do was decide what I wanted to do with the money and where I wanted to go with this whole thing. So I didn’t tell anybody. I kept working. I continued with my daily routines. I had made one phone call to my father. And I told him – it’s a funny story. I said, dad, sit down and prepare for some life-changing news. And he says, oh, you’re getting married. And I said, nope. And he goes, oh, well, then you’re the guy that won the lottery.
MARTIN: No way.
DUKE: Yeah, true story, absolutely true story. And I said yeah. And he goes, far out. I’ll be right down. So, you know, he came down. And then over the course of that couple of weeks, we kind of talked about what to do. I kept it under wraps for close to four or five weeks.
MARTIN: Wow. Wasn’t that hard? I mean, didn’t you kind of just want to tell everyone?
DUKE: Oh, it was fun. Oh, it was fun. It was fun fantasizing about being the guy and then realizing that you’re the guy. And you have that reality-fantasy combination starting to come together. Turned out, it was really important that I did do that because that did give me time to put together a team of people around me that were going to help me do what I wanted to do.
MARTIN: Yeah. Who were they? What did you need them to do for you?
DUKE: Well, in the process of setting goals, I wanted to grow the wealth, so obviously needed to have a really good tax attorney and a corporate business attorney. I knew that we were going to do some publicity to try and generate more opportunity, so I needed a publicist and a banker. And I still have that same team around me today.
MARTIN: So, you said you had done some daydreaming. You’d let yourself kind of fantasize about what it would be like to win 10,000, $20,000. What did those dreams look like, and then how did they change when all of the sudden you were handed a check for millions of dollars?
DUKE: The thing that I was thinking about was what kind of new bike I can buy. I’m into cycling, and one of my fantasies is just getting a really high-end road bike and a really high-end mountain bike.
MARTIN: Yeah, $220 million would do it.
DUKE: Yeah. And that really was the first thing that I did. I stayed in my house, drove a used car for, you know, up to three years afterwards. The more I started to fantasize about what I could do with the money, the more I felt like I should try and keep my feet on the ground and change as little as I could.
MARTIN: Why did that occur to you?
DUKE: You know, I’m not sure. I’m a goal-oriented person. One of the goals that I had put out there for myself after this was try and make the most of this opportunity and not squander the gift that’s been given to me and try to grow into something I can leave behind, leave a legacy behind. And once I started to believe in that goal that I set for myself, it kind of dictated some of my decisions.
MARTIN: So did you quit your job?
DUKE: I did not. I continued on as long as I could. It was crazy. Everybody had the greatest ideas since sliced bread. I got proposals for time machines, flying cars, and eventually I had to quit ’cause it was disrupting the business. I continued to stay on and teach my morning spin class for about two and a half years after.
MARTIN: Did anyone in your life start treating you differently?
DUKE: Oh sure, yeah. Yeah, there’s definitely a preconceived notion, whether it’s good or bad, and that does change your surroundings. And, you know, for sure, it – something like that amplifies everything around you.
MARTIN: Did you have to end any relationships because of how your life changed with this money?
DUKE: You know, I’m pretty fortunate that way. I never had to end a relationship. I had some dating trouble, but that was expected. But (laughter) as far as…
MARTIN: You’d think it would be a boon for your dating life.
DUKE: Yeah, too much of a boon. But as far as loved ones and people that were in my life at the time, I have been pretty fortunate.
MARTIN: There has been, as you probably know, some terribly tragic stories over the years of lottery winners who kind of detached from reality and lose their friends, go bankrupt. How did you avoid all of that, and what is your advice for future lottery winners?
DUKE: I knew the statistics. I knew 6 out of 10 people that won 10 million or less were bankrupt in less than five years. And that’s one thing that I really wanted to not become. The biggest piece of advice I can give somebody that gets put into that, you really have to define what’s important to you, and develop a plan around it. And then get people to help you do what you’re not so good at doing as part of that plan.
MARTIN: Do you still have that mountain bike that you bought?
DUKE: Yeah. I have that mountain bike plus about another 10.
MARTIN: (Laughter) Good for you.
That’s Brad Duke of Star, Idaho. He won $220 million in the Powerball lottery back in 2005. So we checked back in with him this past week, when the Powerball reached nearly a billion dollars. He’s now in a long-term relationship. He still loves cycling and still travels economy class. He’s kept his circle of friends and the team of advisers he hired after winning. And he’s building up the nonprofit he created to donate money to charitable groups in Idaho. Now, about that ridiculously huge Powerball lottery jackpot. Americans gathered around their televisions last night to watch the official drawing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Next number down is 19. That’s followed by 57. And we’re going to wind it up for you tonight with the number 34.
MARTIN: Hours after the drawing, the lottery officials announced there was no winner. And you know what that means. The pot gets richer. There will be another drawing Wednesday, and the prize is now $1.3 billion, which is a ridiculous amount of money. But the odds are crazy low. Reuters quoted a statistics professor at the University of Buffalo who said an American is roughly 25 times more likely to become the next president of the United States than to win at Powerball. But hey, a girl can dream.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.
Lottery winner Brad Duke says he’s always been fascinated by the lottery, and even thought he won once before, when he was 18. Davies Moore/hide caption
toggle captionDavies Moore/
Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.
In 2005, Brad Duke of Star, Idaho, hit a huge jackpot: $220 million in the Powerball lottery. It took a couple days, even a couple of weeks, for the magnitude of his win to hit. He didn’t tell anyone, and went about his daily routines while he tried to figure out what he wanted to do next.
As a regular lottery player, Duke had let himself fantasize about what it might be like to win thousands of dollars someday. As a cyclist, he’d always daydreamed about owning a high-end road bike and a high-end mountain bike, which his actual windfall would certainly cover.
But Duke didn’t go on a spending spree. “I stayed in my house, I drove a used car for up to three years afterwards,” he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “The more I started to fantasize about what I could do with the money, the more I felt like I should try to keep my feet on the ground and change as little as I could.”
BRAD DUKE: I had the ticket in a visor of a rental car at the time, and I had to stop and get fuel. I thought it would be a good time to check the tickets. So, I took the ticket in, let the gals behind the counter run the ticket through. And she made a bunch of weird noises and they started jumping up and down and jumping in circles, and I was trying to actually pluck the ticket out of their hand ’cause my first instinct was just to kind of get out of there.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is Brad Duke, an exercise instructor from Star, Idaho. Duke won a $220 million Powerball jackpot in 2005. And as you might expect, life changed. Winning the lottery forced him to reevaluate his priorities, his expectations, even some relationships. We began by talking about the day he went out and bought that particular lottery ticket. Brad Duke is our Sunday Conversation.
DUKE: I thought maybe that I had won 10 or 20 thousand, but I didn’t confirm it. I went on with my day just daydreaming of what I could do with five, 10, 15, 20 thousand, whatever it may be.
MARTIN: So, that’s day one and it’s confirmed that you win. What happens a couple of days later when you wake up and the reality of this really starts to sink in?
DUKE: You know, it didn’t sink in for a couple of days, you know, probably a couple of weeks. I knew the first thing that I wanted to do was decide what I wanted to do with the money and where I wanted to go with this whole thing. So I didn’t tell anybody. I kept working. I continued with my daily routines. I made one phone call to my father and I told him – it’s a funny story – I said, dad, sit down and prepare for some life-changing news. And he says, oh, you’re getting married. And I said nope. And he goes, well, then you’re the guy that won the lottery.
MARTIN: No way.
DUKE: Yeah, true story, absolutely true story. And I said yeah. And he goes far out. I’ll be right down. So, you know, he came down and over the course of that couple of weeks, we kind of talked about what to do. I kept it under wraps for close to four or five weeks.
MARTIN: Wow. Wasn’t that hard? I mean, didn’t you kind of just want to tell everyone?
DUKE: Oh, it was fun. Oh, it was fun. It was fun fantasizing about being the guy and then realizing that you’re the guy and you have the reality-fantasy combination starting to come together. Turned out it was really important that I did do that because that did give me time to put together a team of people around me that were going to help me do what I wanted to do.
MARTIN: Yeah. Who were they? What did you need them to do for you?
DUKE: Well, in the process of setting goals, I wanted to grow the wealth, so obviously needed to have a really good tax attorney and a corporate business attorney. I knew that we were going to do some publicity to try and generate more opportunity, so I needed a publicist and a banker. And I still have that same team around me today.
MARTIN: So, you said you had done some daydreaming. You let yourself kind of fantasize about what it would be like to win $10,000, 20,000. What did those dreams look like and then how did they change when all of the sudden you were handed a check for millions of dollars?
DUKE: The thing that I was thinking about was kind of bike that I can buy. I’m into cycling, and one of my fantasies is just getting a really high-end road bike and a really high-end mountain bike.
MARTIN: Yeah, $220 million would do it.
DUKE: Yeah. And that really was the first thing that I did. I didn’t spend money. I stayed in my house, drove a used car for, you know, up to three years afterwards. The more I started to fantasize about what I could do with the money, the more I felt like I should try and keep my feet on the ground and change as little as I could.
MARTIN: Why did that occur to you?
DUKE: You know, I’m not sure. I’m a goal-oriented person. One of the goals that I had put out there for myself after this was try and make the most of this opportunity and not squander the gift that’s been given to me and try to grow it something I can leave behind, leave a legacy behind. And once I started to believe in that goal that I set for myself, kind of dictated some of my decisions.
MARTIN: So, did you quit your job?
DUKE: I did not. I continued on as long as I could. It was crazy. Everybody had the greatest ideas since sliced bread. I got proposals for time machines, flying cars, and eventually I had to quit ’cause it was disrupting the business. I continued to stay on and teach my morning spin class for about two and a half years after.
MARTIN: Did anyone in your life start treating you differently?
DUKE: Oh sure, yeah. Yeah, there’s definitely a preconceived notion, whether it’s good or bad, and that does change your surroundings. And, you know, for sure, when something like that amplifies everything around you.
MARTIN: Did you have to end any relationships because how your life changed with this money?
DUKE: You know, I’m pretty fortunate that way. I never had a serious casualty like that where I’ve had to end a relationship. I had some dating trouble, but that was expected.
MARTIN: You think it would be a boom for your dating life?
DUKE: Yeah, too much of a boom. But as far as loved ones and people that were in my life at the time, I have been pretty fortunate.
MARTIN: There has been, as you probably know, some terribly tragic stories over the years of lottery winners who kind of detached from reality and lose their friends, go bankrupt. How did you avoid all of that and what is your advice for future lottery winners?
DUKE: I knew the statistics. I knew six out of 10 people that won 10 million or less were bankrupt in less than five years. You know, so I knew the statistic and that’s one thing that I really wanted to not become. You know, the biggest piece of advice I can give somebody that gets put into that, you really have to define what’s important to you, and develop a plan around it and then get people to help you do what you’re not so good at doing as part of that plan.
MARTIN: You still have that mountain bike that you bought?
DUKE: Yeah. I have that mountain bike plus about another 10.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Good for you. Brad Duke. He won $220 million in a Powerball lottery eight years ago. Brad, thanks so much for talking with us.
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A machine prints Powerball lottery tickets at a convenience store in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Saturday’s jackpot has risen to $900 million. Saul Loeb./AFP/Getty Imageshide caption
toggle captionSaul Loeb./AFP/Getty Images
One number has everybody’s attention this afternoon. But why stop at one?
Here’s the prize jackpot, plus a few other lottery stats worth knowing:
$900,000,000
The eye-popping, record-breaking Powerball jackpot value, as of Saturday afternoon. If no one wins tonight, the jackpot could crack a billion.
That’s based on a single winner selecting the annuity option, which pays out over three decades. Alternately …
$558,000,000
The cash payout that rarely gets the boldfaced headline treatment, but it’s the more likely winning amount. The vast majority of jackpot winners choose the cash payout, even though it’s always significantly smaller than the jackpot.
You could hypothetically benefit from choosing the upfront payout — provided you invest the money instead of spending it. Which of course is exactly what you’d do, right?
$220,968,000
The tax man cometh. If you win and choose the lump-sum payment, expect to pay north of $200 million in federal taxes, at the 39.6 percent top income bracket — not counting state income tax.
1 in 292,201,338
One in 292 million. Those are your odds of winning the jackpot.
Not one in a million, not one in 10 million … one in 292 million.
Here’s a way to more viscerally experience the long odds. The Los Angeles Times put together a demonstration of playing the Powerball odds, in chunks of $100 or $1,000 or more — tallying up your total losses over time.
You can plug in truly enormous amounts of money and watch probability at work all afternoon, if that sounds like fun. So far, this reporter is down 104 grand.
That was the range, as of 2012, of total payouts by U.S. states, as Steve Tripoli reported for NPR in 2014. That is, of all the dollars paid for lottery tickets, that’s the percentage paid back to winners.
West Virginia claimed the 15 percent, Massachusetts the 73 percent, while most states were in the 50 to 70 percent range. (You can look up your own state in our chart).
For the record: Those are all abysmal rates by gambling standards. Most casino games pay back more than 90 percent, Tripoli says; the house still wins, of course, but it doesn’t win by nearly as much as state lotteries do.
44 states (plus D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands)
The vast majority of American states offer a lottery these days. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah and Mississippi are holdouts, refusing to participate in either Powerball or Mega Millions. Some states cite religious objections, while in Nevada, the powerful gambling industry views lotteries as competition.
Residents of those states can still play the lottery — but they have to travel to a participating state to do it.
(Puerto Rico has Powerball but not Mega Millions. Now you know.)
Of course, the cost isn’t distributed equally, he notes. There’s geographic variation — with annual spending north of $700 in Rhode Island, South Dakota and Massachusetts, based on state populations, while well under $100 per capita in other states.
There’s also variation based on income. Study after study has found low-income communities spend more of their money on lotteries than high-income communities, Thompson writes.
That economic variation is why people call state lotteries regressive taxes — that is, a way of funding the state that disproportionately takes money from the poor.
On Saturday, Vox pointed out an intriguing decade-old study suggesting that lotteries become less regressive as the jackpot size increases — that is, richer people are more likely to buy tickets for big prizes, lessening the disproportionate impact on the poor. Economist Emily Oster, then a graduate student at Harvard, suggested that a jackpot of $806 million would actually be progressive instead of regressive.
At the time, that jackpot size was theoretical — but not any more.
27 cents
According to the lottery industry’s own trade magazine, for every dollar spent on the lottery, an average of 27 cents goes to the “beneficiaries” — the oft-touted government spending programs supported by a lottery, usually in areas like education or recreation.
A cut goes towards administering the lottery (which is far more expensive than collecting a tax — one analysis by a conservative think tank found lotteries are up to 50 times more costly than tax collection). A chunk, of course, goes towards the winners. Some goes to retailers, some to the companies that design and operate the lottery systems. What’s left goes into state coffers.
The average might be 27 cents to state expenses, like the industry says, but it can be as low as 11 cents to the dollar, NBC News reports.
Zero
That’s the impact of a lottery win on net happiness, at least at first.
A famous 1978 study found that major lottery winners were no happier than ordinary folks, and actually got less joy from daily activities. A 2008 Dutch study found winning the lottery doesn’t make a household happier.
Now, a caveat: Two studies out of England suggest that it is possible to win the lottery and be content — but only eventually.
“No researcher has ever found that people are happier in the first year after winning the lottery,” one of the researchers told The New YorkTimes
And the Times’ social science reporter suggests that it might take longer and longer to find contentment the larger your win is. So, about that $900 million …
Even numbers higher than 31
OK, if you insist: You can’t increase your odds of winning the lottery, but you can increase the chance that — if you do win — you won’t have to split the jackpot.
People tend to include birthdays and other dates in their lottery numbers, mathematician Aaron Abrams told NPR’s Robert Siegel in 2012, which means more numbers between 1 and 31. And people have a bias towards odd numbers.
So, for best results: Even numbers higher than 31.
But have we mentioned? One in 292,201,338.
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