gamblers

Even though the month is less than half over, I'm awarding the Golden Catclump for parapgraph of the month to Charlie Pierce, who blogs on the Esquire Magazine site, for this masterpiece:

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.") 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.

Don't let the blazing style overshadow Charlie's point -- the Untied States now produces very little other than bets. So what are our chances for survival following our current format?