A New Deal for Online Poker With Obama Administration?

Roll Call covers Capitol Hill policy and behind-the-scenes political developments better than any other publication. The paper is published Monday through Thursday when Congress is in session, and recently it ran an editorial that every poker fan should be aware of.

Alfonse D'Amato, former Republican senator from New York who now serves as the chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, made a strong case for taxing and regulating online poker in a recent article titled "The New Deal: Regulate and Tax iPoker."

By now, you've probably heard that President Obama is an experienced poker player. D'Amato asks our new president to "look at his favored form of skillful avocation: poker" as a way to collect new tax revenue for our nation. He goes on to say, "If Obama applies his poker skills to his job in the White House, he will reject politically unpopular and economically untenable tax increases and look seriously at other potential revenue streams like Internet poker."

Thanks to Card Player readers and Poker Players Alliance supporters, D'Amato was able to cite the fact that the topic of regulated Internet poker is one of the top 10 most popular proposals that citizens want Obama to enact while in office. The Obama administration is soliciting feedback from the American public about what they want his presidency to focus on at Obama's Citizen's Briefing Book website, and D'Amato says the poker proposal has received the most user comments of any briefing suggestion by far.

D'Amato's editorial brings up a number of commonsense points that, hopefully, all politicians will consider. He argues that the government should not get in the way if adults choose to compete in a skill game in the comfort of their own homes. And he asks why our nation would sit back and let tax revenue generated from our poker industry siphon overseas to nations that have established a regulatory and tax structure for online sites.

In a time when our nation is attempting to stimulate our struggling economy without raising taxes, D'Amato's article makes a lot of sense.

Hopefully, his statement "the absence of government regulation, and in fact the quixotic efforts to ban Internet poker, has left U.S. consumers vulnerable and left billions in potential tax revenue on the virtual poker table" will not fall on deaf ears.

You can check out the entire editorial at www.CardPlayer.com/link/NewDeal.

The poker community has bombarded websites like the Citizen's Briefing Book with constructive comments. If you haven't already done so, please comment, join the Poker Players Alliance, and fight for your poker rights.