Dobleve

  Spain has a lottery system that is a little different than the one we’re used to.  There are lotteries every week, with the biggest one being the Christmas lottery, drawn every year a few days before Christmas day.  Some are for charity, others are just for the fun of winning (or as is likely, losing).  The national Christmas lottery is all about winning a huge purse.

  The way the lottery works here is that you buy tickets with a number already on them; they cost various amounts, the bigger the prize the more they cost, for example some Christmas lottery tickets are $25 or more.  This is like a raffle except multiple people have the same ticket number.  We didn’t really catch on to this system the first time we bought tickets; a friend asked us to buy tickets for a charity lottery where half the proceeds went to the winners and the other half to charity, a common arrangement.  We figured we’d spend $20 and they were $5 each so we bought 4.  We got 4 tickets and a strange look we didn’t understand until later.  Did we seem cheap only kicking in $20 for the charity?  This was our friend after all and he had a whole book of tickets he needed to sell.  No it turns out, we seemed dumb for buying 4 tickets with the exact same number on them but our friend was kind enough to not make fun of us at the time of sale.  

  The Christmas lotteries are a big deal and there are lots of them, from the big national one to the local ones, and people stand in line for weeks beforehand to buy the big national tickets.  The day after the numbers are picked all news in the paper moves inside – the entire front page (tabloid sized) is devoted to lists of winning lottery numbers in small print; think the stock market page only more dense.  

  And then the clever Spanish part kicks in.  Its worth a side note that Spain, like other countries with socialized medicine, has a high income tax rate.  It also has lots of jobs where its perfectly normal (and desirable) to pay cash for the goods, work, or whatever it is you need.  This makes it easy to lose some of that cash under the till, out of sight of the tax collectors.  But sooner or later you need to launder that lost cash, it can really pile up on you….  What better way to do that than during the holidays when a bunch of people win $1000 to over a million dollars.  Should you be lucky enough to win the lottery here you might also get a visit from a friendly neighbor offering to buy that winning ticket from you for slightly more than the actual winning amount, payable over a bit of time.  You win, your neighbor wins, the cash suddenly looks cleaner (or at least harder to trace) and socialized care loses a bit.