Poker Perambulation

I ran into that annoying song when I visited the Disney display at the New York World’s Fair. It has hounded me since. When I thought of the title, the damn thing is running through my mind as I type this. We learned about small world with what happened to Neteller – a legal, licensed, listed stock in the U.K. that our government went beyond inconveniencing.

Before the global economy, world markets were highly regulated. They weren’t very efficient and many remain that way. In this new economy, much has improved and it is change the way the world operates. We still have inefficiencies in many areas like archaic support of commodities that benefit farmers world wide.

Most of the time our view of money is pretty insular. We get our pay or other form of short term revenue and allocate it for the necessities and have some left for our enjoyment – like throwing a few buck on a poker site or some other luxury item. Money is very efficient. It can be move from here to there in a variety of ways. EFT or ACH ‘wire’ money to the other side of the world in minutes. Even throwing in accounting (back office) requirements and the magnitude, Neteller got our money to most of us in a single day.

The War on Terror has studied this movement and come up with some remarkable information about this global economy that was mostly ignored. It is far larger than anyone figured.

• 191 million migrants worldwide
• USD 276 billion in remittances worldwide
• 24.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs)

Money has always been associated with a black market. It is nothing new to find a way to work ‘off the clock’ where taxes are not collected. With a pie in the sky assumption that our politicians would not have spent the added revenue, it is pretty safe to assume that our national debt would be non-existent had all taxes been collected.

Stiffing Uncle Sam doesn’t seem like a big deal and it is pretty nice if we can do it. But with the info above you can see that the proportions are greater than the guy with the mowers on a truck that goes around mowing lawns. When money moves in the volume shown above though, it impacts our everyday existence. Money builds plants that create jobs. Money that stays at home is available to create paychecks and pay increases. Sub-rosa money doesn’t do that or does it half way around the world for another party. They may be deserving folks and that money may keep them alive; but, it comes out of your paycheck or benefits. In good times, that isn’t a recognized problem and we may even laud the activity. In tougher times, it can mean the loss of your paycheck.

Locally, we’ve had a Mexican women holed up in a store front church for the last year. She was caught and being deported when she took this novel approach. She managed to have a child here – father in parts unknown. And the boy can stay and she can’t. Sad story and she’s trying to work the system to stay. Without paying taxes on her behalf, she has been a cost in child medicine and schooling that she made little or no contribution toward. That isn’t a huge deal until you multiply it by 191 million worldwide. Here in the U.S. it is over 41 billion dollars. That is money that could have gone to repair bridges or build plants to increase our personal and national wealth.

The stupidity that is the UIGEA remains small potatoes in all that. But it shows how insular our government’s thinking is on the global effects of it being a ‘Small World After All’. Whether it is immigration, migrant workers, or playing a bit of poker, we don’t manage it properly and that government inefficiency is coming out of our pockets.

ADDENDUM:

There is the misunderstanding that American’s won’t work. That’s the justification for using Mexican labor to pick fruits and vegetables and do things like maid work. If you’ve been following the mine collapse and nobody can avoid that in the media, you’ve seen a job that employees both illegals and citizens and there’s a mix of those at the bottom of that mine. It isn’t a great way to get by. But, there are a lot of Americans working in that labor force. I’m sure they’d all like a better job but that isn’t in the cards. Those without the education or luck to find a better job have that as an alternative to provide for their family. The difference between that and other jobs in the category “Americans won’t do them.” is that it is at or just above a living wage.

All of this leads to tradeoffs. And, either contributes in a small or large way to inflation. The minimum wage increase is a joke but one that politicians can ride. People with minimum wage jobs with the increase are mostly part time workers. Those outside the category aren’t getting a living wage with the increase. In Albania it would be a huge amount of earnings though. Global inequities lead to problem and misperception. We’ll never manage to fully correct it; all we can try to do is minimize the impact.

The decline of the dollar and the risk of inflation are present. Our strong economy has allowed us to ignore that. All the stuff this blog talked about has had it added impact. But, we always end up paying the piper. We had the ‘new economy’ hoopla in 2000 and you saw the results. Stay grounded and consider things beyond the current level of noise.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 6:07 am and is filed under Journal, Off Topic, poker legislation. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.