Charles P. Pierce: The United States of America is now nothing more than a place where you gamble.

[kpete]

Gambling Nation
By Charles P. Pierce
at 8:00AM

(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

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The United States of America is now nothing more than a place where you gamble.

Consider: most every state in the Union, including the Commonwealth (God save it!) here, would rather build 20 casinos than risk raising taxes a dime, as though gambling itself were not a brutal tax. (How do I know this? Because once, long ago, on the night Mark McGwire and his pharmacist went past Roger Maris and his bartender for the single-season home run record, I sat in a casino in Tunica, Mississippi and watched a 300-pound woman with oxygen tubes up her nose feed quarters into a slot machine while wearing a T-shirt that said, "Jesus Is The Answer." This was the same trip on which I saw a billboard outside Vicksburg that suggested, "Sell Your Car For Cash.&quot The entire Republican economic plan is one long gamble on a bunch of economic theories that already have failed twice in my lifetime. Ask even earnest young liberals how you manage to get a middle class without a manufacturing base, an active government, and strong unions, and you get the same kind of shrug you get along the rail when you ask someone why they bet the 5-horse when the creature plainly has hooves the size of a country ham. Ask Willard Romney the same thing, and he makes even less sense.

Get a hunch, bet a bunch.

Whaddya say we put that on the money?

I saw it in Wisconsin, where the voters actually took seriously (twice!) the arguments made by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's editorial board that Scott Walker was worth having as governor because at least he would do something, and that made him entirely worth the risk. It's like people took all that Neustadt that we were taught in political-science after JFK got waxed and turned it into The Racing Form. It is always better to do something than to do nothing. This is how we get C-Plus Augustus going with his "gut," which was, admittedly, brighter than his head, but not by much.

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please, READ the rest:
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Holding_Them_And_Folding_Them#ixzz1xadKCAmy

[cbrer]

1. I'll bet

The plutocracy will get some surprises if current economic trends continue, and more Americans get ruined to provide the 1% with more wealth.

[firehorse]

2. Don't forget the biggest casino of banksters, traders, and hedge fund managers.

[n2doc]

3. and the 401k scam n/t