I know how Michael enjoys metaphors from the card table

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones offers a critique of Mankiw's assessment of how proposed income tax changes (letting Bush's deficit-enhancing tax cuts expire on high-end incomes) would affect him:

Do you see the card he palmed? Basically, the effect of letting the Bush cuts expire is so tiny that the only way to make it noticeable is to compound it over 30 years, which reduces his eventual payout from $2,000 to $1,700.