DC is a Place for Gamblers, but Even Casinos Take Offense at What Goes on There

Gambling happens in Casinos and to a large degree it also happens in politics. It's in Washington D.C. The biggest bets in the world are placed in this casino on a daily basis. It may not be a casino nor a virtual casino but Washington is big on gambling. Washington DC is the real life game capital of the world that make casinos look like they are artistic imitations. Washington, D.C. is no ordinary casino. Although it acts as the house it also makes wagers against it's own interests. Compulsive gamblers tend to be the ones that risk running for election since every election is more of a game with stakes and rules of chance than a lot of popular casino games. The stakes can be much higher in Washington dc where reputations are as much at risk as money. The games played in D.C. are unfamiliar to most casino gamblers. Sometimes the odds can be a lot better than Vegas but most of the time Washington D.C. exercises a disproportionate house advantage.

At some of the best Vegas casinos the worst house advantage odds might be on keno or slot machines with the worst house advantage of 15 -20 percent. Compare this to the house advantage of 35 percent to 95 percent of the US Capitol. The way to calculate the US government house advantage is as simple as looking at the tax rates and compounding them. All of us who are citizens and non citizens are gambling just because of the existence of Washington , D.C. whether we like it or not. Our votes have as little influence on the random results as pushing the button on a slot machine over and over again with each wager. Washington, itself is also gambling, making bets on everything including the published odds they say favor global warming, potential nuclear war, trillion dollar bets on "stimulus spending". The amounts of money wagered by government itself is astounding in billions and trillions of dollars. One bad program can lead to disastrous results or might lead to no net gain or loss. Very few times does government hit the jackpot as often as they do try.

The house always wins from the tax payer perspective, the special interests with clout are allowed to rig the games and they usually win in the long run, but the government, itself the house, seems to lose most of the time. As the world's most compulsive gambler, the US Government rarely takes any credit for it's failures and it's successes usually have infinite financial resources backing them.

There have been many gambles in Washington, DC over the years. The first big gamble was the revolutionary war and that predates the present capitol. The United States is not the only country that ever had a casino capitol. The Russians and French had casino mentality monarchs and emperors as an example. The Louisiana purchase resulted from a series of bad French bets. The Purchase of Alaska resulted from Russian Over extension. The Spanish controlled half the world at one point bet it all against the British and lost most of it. The British Empire resulted form a series of good bets that could have had unfortunate consequences. Casino Washington, DC seems to be gambling mood even once it after it reaches its pinnacle as "the only world super power". That is a sure sign of a compulsive gambling problem?

The problem with the last two administrations is that the bets don't come with any hedging. Bush Trust the country into two wars nearly on the opposite side of the earth even when there were probably less punitive ways to go about attempting to get the same uneasy final results. The Obama administration is intent on repeating the same mistakes that FDR and Jimmy Carter subjected the nation to believing that just because something failed the first time that the second and third time that the results should be more promising. A gambler who looses all of his money once and then tries to make it back against rational odds is not where the US Government should be 'investing' our financial resources?

The wonderful thing about Washington, DC, is that the gambling is ultimately a democratic process. If you think that improves your odds in a casino then before you push the button on the video lottery slot machine take a poll of nearby people in the casino and see if they want you to push the button or not. If that makes any difference then the Al Gore scientific global warming consensus should make a lot of sense to you. It looks like a big gamble to other scientists who happen to know that there are a lot of undefined and unknown variables that make the scientific climate modeling a complete crap shoot. Finding a geophysical basis for a "normal" climate range goes back billions of years and not just 300 years or less since the invention of the thermometer and twenty years since the remote satellite weather measurements and interpretations. Leave a few feed backs in the environment out of the loop and the consensus could be completely, disastrously, wrong. The odds that global warming due to green house gases could be less than 20%. Book makers probably don't know how to interpret the data. Have you heard of a book maker making it possible to bet on the weather on a daily basis? What are the chances that your weather station reporter is right about the forecast going out more than a week? They do pretty well with the satellite data but going out a week or more the best they can do is say something like it should be cooler in the autumn than the summer. Just because it has not rained for 10 years in a desert does not mean it won't happen when it does. That is an easier bet to make than with the known odds and records of rainfall than trying to bet on substantial changes to global weather based on an apparent increase in certain gases in the atmosphere.

If casino Washington, DC, makes some really dumb bets with trillions of dollars do we end up having to give back the Louisiana Purchase to France and Alaska to the Russians? There are consequences to reckless betting schemes. What about the consequences of socialized medicine proving to be a worse disaster than the present Medicare blessed system? It the program ultimately proves to cost over a trillion dollars a year is that consequence worth the gamble if the whole thing turns out to be the next Amtrak where one rail line is cut after another until a highly subsidized government rail program goes almost nowhere and runs on perpetual red ink. It would cost us all a lot less to give each and every Senator and Representative in the congress a million dollars in money to take to Las Vegas and let them make money for us there instead of in Washington , DC. I think Las Vegas would approve.