Cure For City's Financial Woes: 'Fee' On Three-Card Monte

Hey, where's the city's cut of that loot?

Cops from the city's central district this week reported busting up a game of three-card monte by Pier 35. Good thing, too -- apparently, the schemer was using a trio of bottle caps to conceal a ball (which he palmed, of course), and that's low-class. It reflects poorly upon our city for purveyors of fraudulent games to use shoddy materials like bottle caps. Are there no cups for this man?

While the purveyors of this game were taken into custody, this is the wrong approach. Based upon the passage of Mayor Gavin Newsom's transparently opportunistic cigarette fee -- the methodology and rationale are manifestly dishonest; it's simply a chance to wrest much-needed funds from a group of people who are looked down upon and have no political pull here -- three-card monte scammers shouldn't be arrested but deputized by the city. Force them to hand over a certain percentage of their "earnings" to a devoted fund and set them off on their merry way.

In the same way that smokers really can't complain about being asked to cough up an extra 20 cents per pack for a habit even biblical young earthers know will kill you, how can someone naive enough to actually plink money on the table of a three-card monte player operating in a well-known tourist haven have the temerity to complain when he's hustled?

Frankly, tapping into the city's three-card monte industry would actually be more honest than Newsom's cigarette fee. Either the folks crafting this fee really have no clue about the difference between abstract and concrete concepts -- they honestly think that since the city spends Y dollars cleaning up crap and cigarette butts make up X percent of the crap, then the city spends X*Y dollars cleaning up cigarette butts -- or they're being disingenuous. And there's still no good explanation as to why San Franciscans aren't asked to pay a fee on, say, chewing gum (wrappers, wads of gum), fast food (faux cheese- and grease-soaked detritus), or Mad Dog 20/20 (bottles, urine, vomit). Perhaps that's next.

A three-card monte fee would be along the lines of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano's proposed Marijuana bill; you're an adult and you can make your own decisions -- but the government would like a cut, thank you very much.

"Don't play three-card monte" is right up there with "Don't play cards with a man missing eight teeth and a nickname involving a city" or "Don't wear your underwear on the outside." There comes a point when a city's duty shifts from protecting the needy to funding said protection by extracting funds from the aggressively foolish with money to burn. This is such a case.

Photo   |   ZioDave