Steering a global economy

BusinessWeek carried an interesting article on how governments are struggling to come to terms with the global economony. It states that the cost of imported goods and services will exceed federal revenues, i.e. Americans will soon pay more to foreigners than to their national government. This is never more clear than the recent US legislation effectively banning online gambling. The motivation was not of a moral nature given that certain states have casinos and state lotteries are legal. But the reality is someone figured out that $6 billion dollars were flowing annually out of the US and none of that flowed into federal coffers. I wonder if anyone figured out the net outflow or inflow of other online ecommerce operations like eBay and what would governments do if they realized that a bulk of their wealth was being channeled out of their countries with little or no tax at all.