Destitue Lottery Winners

Canadians seem to really like the fact that lottery or other cash winnings are except from taxation. This is not true in most other countries including the United States. I have a hard time figuring out why this is so popular. After all, lottery winners are not destitute, and they didn't do anything to deserve the winnings (you can say lottery winners deserve their cash for taking risk, but this certainly isn't true for people on "deal or no deal"). You would think that society would want to soak these people in taxes the same way they do folks who inherit a lot of money.

My best guess would be that people are attracted by the fact that their are merit based pre-requisites to winning large amounts of money. Most people know that they probably aren't going to go out and make a huge fortune. They also know that they aren't going to inherit a huge amount of money. Winning the lottery however, could be accomplished by a very lucky monkey with proper training, and that's what we like about it.