Gaming the system

Reader question:

Please explain “gaming the system” in this headline: Obama criticizes offshore tax havens for ‘gaming the system’.

My comments:

Here, tax havens (regions that allow foreign corporations to avoid taxation) are rapped by US President Barack Obama for colluding with international companies to allow the latter to evade taxes.

Gaming the system is literally playing the system, game as in “play a game of basketball”. Game, you see, is mostly used as a noun. When it is used as a verb, it sounds unusual and, as William Safire points out (see example articles below) in his language column, sinister. It gives a “rakish connotation”.

In other words, to play is to amuse and have fun, and that is all right but to “game” sounds the same as “to gamble” and “to swindle”.

In other words, to “game” is to cheat, i.e. cheat the game itself.

All games, be they in the playground or on the stock market, have systems, or rules and regulations that ensure the integrity of the games being played, making sure things proceed smoothly and everyone involved is treated equally and fairly.

Needless to say, the system, that is all the rules and regulations that govern the system, is imperfect, such being the human state we’re all in.

Put plainly, the system has loopholes and if you try to take advantage of the said loopholes for personal gain instead of finding ways to close the holes, then you’re gaming the system.

Or milking it, to use a similar term that’s more easily understandable.

All right, no more ado, here are media examples of people who use their position to game the system instead of following the rules fair and square:

1. Interrogated this year by U.S. investigators in his Iraq prison cell about prewar U.N. inspections, Tariq Aziz quoted Saddam Hussein as having told his manipulative Higher Committee in 2002, “These people are playing a game with us — we’ll play a game with them.”

That technique is known in the American vernacular as gaming the system. This summer, President Bush said of Saddam Hussein, “Intelligence clearly says that he was gaming the system.” In an October news conference, the president used the phrase redundantly: “The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the U.N. oil-for-food program to try to influence countries ... to undermine sanctions.”

Sarah Green, in e-mail-land, writes: “Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky accused his opponent, a doctor, of gaming the medical system. Environmentalists accused utility companies of getting away with lax water-safety standards — again by gaming the system. What I want to know is, what is this game, and will they let me play?”

You don’t want to play this ancient game. In Standard English, the verb rooted in the Teutonic gamen became to game and had the innocent meaning of “to play, to amuse.” As a noun, that meaning still holds; but as a verb and its participle, gaming, along with the related gambling, the word gained a rakish connotation.

As a slang adjective, however, game began as a synonym for “whorish”; in the 1698 Dictionary of the Canting Crew, it is defined as “at a Bawdy-house, Lewd Women,” and Farmer and Henley’s 1890 slang dictionary has an entry for game-woman defined as “a prostitute.” Although Cab Calloway's 1944 Hepster’s Dictionary defined gammin’ as merely “flirtatious,” the nonsexual slang meaning of the verb to game has long been “to swindle.”

But when was gaming, in its slangy, crapshooting sense, applied to a system? Earliest citation I can find in the Factiva database comes from the March 24, 1985, Sunday Oklahoman, in an article by Chris Casteel about DNR (do not resuscitate) orders in hospitals. The sponsor of state legislation dealing with this issue, Cal Hobson, was quoted saying, “We’re gaming the system to deal with the problem.”

- Safire: We’ve been ‘gaming the system’ for, oh, centuries now, Chron.com, November 21, 2004.

2. Luck, HBO’s horse-racing series, is about the other American pastime: gaming the system.

Early in the new HBO series Luck, a gangster’s chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina), goes to L.A.’s Santa Anita racetrack with his boss, Chester “Ace” Bern-stein (Dustin Hoffman), and makes a bet on a long shot. When the horse comes in, Gus clutches his winning ticket and says happily: “Don’t ever let anyone tell you this isn’t a great fucking country.”

I wouldn’t dream of it. But I will point out that Gus doesn’t win his bet because he’s been shrewd or even lucky. He wins because he’s gotten an inside tip from a dodgy trainer, a fact that, in the exhilaration of victory, he either forgets or takes for granted. Such is the slippery world of Luck, a program that aspires to capture not only the rich splendor of horse racing but this country in all its star-spangled dreams and delusions. This is no less than you’d expect of a show created by writer David Milch and co-produced by director Michael Mann, guys nobody would ever accuse of thinking small. While Mann has made a career in flamboyant pop mythology, from Miami Vice to The Last of the Mohicans to Public Enemies, Milch has spent years anatomizing the American soul (and underbelly), most famously in Deadwood where he took advantage of long-form TV to tell a story novelistic in its richness. At one in their obeisance to the samurai code of masculinity—which didn’t stop them from battling on the set—they’ve cooked up a show that uses the racetrack to explore the tug-of-war between the opposing sides of our national psyche: the neon allure of excitement and moola and the quiet yearning for Something More.

If Deadwood was a teeming mural of wide-open capitalism in the Wild West—dominated by the Shakespearean brilliance of Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen—Luck takes place in a dwindling, present-day California where the cocky poker whiz is Chinese (of course) and financial types condescend even to mobsters about derivatives. The plot pinballs among three tiers of characters who embody an askew version of our class structure: At the top are scheming thugs; at the bottom, grungy hard-core gamblers; in between (and, to my mind the most interesting group) are those who do the tricky, laborious work that makes horse racing go. Nearly all the characters are male, which feels more Mannish than Milchy, and it’s hard to imagine them voting, let alone voting for a Democrat. Now, there’s something more than a little nostalgic in making a TV series about horse racing, especially using it to explore American life in an era when the reigning metaphor is not the track but the casino. The Sport of Kings has faded badly in recent decades, perhaps because most of us have ridden more wooden horses than living ones. Few ordinary people follow racing anymore, not even the Triple Crown, and its remaining fans grumble about the sport’s competitive decline: Races now typically resemble this year’s Republican presidential field—a bunch of nags chasing a prohibitive favorite that the crowd is rooting against. The money that once supported the sport is being swallowed by all those electronic slots that hypnotized William Bennett. Indeed, it’s central to Luck’s not altogether satisfying plot that Hoffman’s Ace plans to buy a racetrack and then turn it into a casino, a trick he thinks he can pull off because of California’s crumbling tax base. Politicians are dying for any new form of revenue.

- The Inside Track, by John Powers, January 26, 2017.

3. US President Barack Obama said Tuesday that the revelations that powerful international politicians and businessmen have hidden money in shell companies shows tax avoidance is a global issue.

He said wealthy individuals and corporations are “gaming the system” by making use of tax code loopholes that average taxpayers do not have access to.

He also labelled “insidious” the growing practice of US companies merging with foreign firms just to cut their tax liabilities.

While enjoying the strengths of the US economy -- its workers, rule of law, and infrastructure -- such companies are not “paying their fair share,” he said.

“Tax avoidance is a big global problem,” Obama said, making reference to documents leaked from a Panama law firm that show thousands of anonymous companies could have been used by wealthy people to hide income.

“It’s not unique to other countries, because there are people in America who are taking advantage of the same stuff.”

“A lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem.”

Obama took aim at companies exploiting weaknesses in laws to legally slash their US tax obligations, effectively undercutting the US government’s income base.

On Monday, the US Treasury tightened rules against “inversion” deals, in which US companies merge with foreign firms to move their official address offshore -- but not their US operations -- to avoid paying US taxes.

Such moves, like a pending $160 billion tie-up between pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Allergan, exploit loopholes that allow the companies to “get out of paying their fair share of taxes here at home,” Obama said.

“They effectively renounce their citizenship. They declare that they’re based somewhere else, thereby getting all the rewards of being an American company without fulfilling the responsibilities to pay their taxes the way everybody else is supposed to pay them,” he said.

“It sticks the rest of us with the tab. And it makes hard-working Americans feel like the deck is stacked against them.”

The president called for Congress to take action on tax code reforms to eliminate loopholes that allow such blatant avoidance.

Tax laws “are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they’ve got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities,” Obama said.

- Obama: tax avoidance is ‘a big global problem’, AFP, April 6, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.