With all due respect to the people who run the state lotteries, I wish they were selling Individual Retirement Accounts. The money you invest in the stock market, or even just put in the bank, would be put to better use by the companies whose stocks you buy as they seek public capital, or by the borrowers who secure loans from banks to build businesses that create jobs.

It's not just that $325 million of dreams went down the drain a minute after the winning lottery numbers were pulled April 17. That's only about half the story. Don't forget about the money the "house" gets to keep. In this case, the "house" is the state treasury departments that participated in the game. Some portion of the amount wagered goes back to "worthy causes" that state Mega Millions Lottery Tickets, Megamillions, Megamillion, Mega Million, Powerball Lottery Tickets, Powerball Tickets and Powerball Online directors tell us might otherwise not get funded.

But when education gets funded by lottery receipts, it just means that money that would have otherwise been appropriated by state legislatures can be diverted to other--perhaps less worthy--projects. Buying lottery tickets is just another form of taxation, seemingly a little less painful. State revenue directors count on it.

Money is fungible. That means once the money hits the state's coffers, it can be directed to any use. A dollar bill doesn't come with a label that says: "wagered on the multi-state Big Game lottery in the knowledge that the state's share will go to education."

Dreams are fungible too. So your dreams of Mega Millions Lottery Tickets, Megamillions, Megamillion, Mega Million, Powerball Lottery Tickets, Powerball Tickets and Powerball Online winnings could easily be replaced with dreams of a retirement that could be funded by a growing stock portfolio and tax-free distributions. The odds are so much better. In fact, if America continues to grow and prosper, this is as close as you can get to a sure thing.

So why do so many lottery players prefer the long odds of a state-run game? Is the dream itself of beating 76 million-to-1 odds that much more rewarding than watching a retirement fund grow?