No Benefits for Amsterdam Lottery Winners

Members of Amsterdam’s underclass have expressed their horror at the news that winning the lottery can affect your entitlement to state benefits.

The Netherlands largest charity, the National Postcode Lottery, has a rather interesting twist: as well as dividing €21.8m between seven lucky residents of the same street, a further €21.8m is split between every other resident of the same postcode who happened to buy a ticket for that night’s draw. For postcode 1107 in Amsterdam’s Zuidoost district, this has resulted in a share of €6,812.50 per ticket-buying resident.

You might imagine that this exciting windfall would be a slice of unmitigated good news but, as it turns out, this area mostly contains multi-generational welfare spongers and, in a twist that has brought unbridled joy to the residents of every other postcode in the Netherlands, the cut-off point for welfare benefits is €5,895.

The Dutch government and the Amsterdam City Council both already have access to citizens’ bank accounts, so, determining who the lucky 1,600 are has been easy. With typical, brutal efficiency, the bureaucrats will now throw any winning welfare recipients out of the system and they will have to go through the complicated application system all over again, once the equivalent amount of time has passed.

American President Bill Clinton is an official ambassador to the National Postcode Lottery but, unlike citizens of the Netherlands, his bank account remains private.