Poker Conspiracy, part II
Since my supposed poker conspiracy seems to be my most popular post, I thought I'd follow up with an addendum...
- Democrats get voted in to both houses of Congress and tax the bejeebies out of online poker, making even the worst rake seem like a miniscule sum
But would it be so bad to tax online gambling? I'm not sure it would be a bad thing. On one hand, we pay taxes every day betting that our elected officials will use the money wisely. Then they go and do some crazy thing like making online gambling illegal. So, what's the harm in legalizing gambling? Why not tax everything a little more? You can't say that it's unfair to the people who have gambling addictions: a) those people will find a gambling outlet anyway, and b) we already tax people who are addicted to smoking (and huffing gas, but that might be an extreme example).
But don't get your hopes up. Apparently, dem Dem's even offered an option to Congress to form a commission to study to find a way to tax online gambling so the gub'ment could get its part of the $13B Americans lose spend gambling online each year. But in the end, Senator Frist's moral argument somehow won out. That is, if you ignore the exemptions for online horse betting and lotteries... Maybe Bill Frist should have spent his time calculating the odds that this might cost him the election in 2008 instead of betting on other odds.
My predictions?
Despite the best efforts of the
Poker Player's Alliance and comparisons to Prohibition, online gambling stays illegal.
Bill Frist loses the election in 2008 by a landslide.
The World Series of Poker has 13,000 entrants for the main event in 2007
The rebel online gambling sites like FullTilt, Bodog, etc. decide to block American players by mid 2007, bowing to the illegitimate law put in place by scummy crooked politicians with their hands deep in the pockets of their richest backers.
Even if you only play home games for fun and have never bet online, join the Poker Players Alliance. Now that online gambling is illegal, it's just a stone's throw away to other forms of gambling - brick and mortar included.