Coastal casino gambling, whose touts in the Columbia consulting claque are holding it up as the junkie's quick-fix alternative to real economic development, is a mug's game designed to con young people into thinking they'll get good jobs and old people they might win something. And with all their built-in advantages, casinos are in trouble:

          ...Resistance to gambling, however, has been overwhelmed by the need for new sources of public revenue in an era when it has become nearly impossible, at any level of government, to raise taxes or even to let temporary tax cuts expire. A kind of self-perpetuating momentum fuels gambling’s growth: the more states that legalize it, the more politicians in states that haven’t done so argue that if their citizens are going to throw money into slot machines, they might as well do it at home. “Those people would lose that money anyway,” Ed Rendell, the voluble former governor of Pennsylvania, said in a tense appearance on “60 Minutes” last year. Teeth clenched, he continued, “You’re simpletons, you’re idiots if you don’t get that.”

          Butera reacts to the debates over gambling with a sense of amusement. “Few governors or senators or House members want to say, ‘I absolutely love having casinos in my market,’ ” he said. “It’s more like: ‘We can manage this. And here’s what we’ll do. We’ll put it in the right place, it won’t impact our society too much and we’ll make some money.’ ”

          Casino gambling exists in 36 states. Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, and around 450 Indian casinos now dot the American landscape. Some are no more than trailers on barren, remote land, but several are large resort casinos near major population centers.

          Connecticut’s agreement, or compact, with the Pequots permits various table games at Foxwoods, including blackjack, poker and roulette, along with lesser-known games of chance like chuck-a-luck, pan game, money-wheels and bouncing ball. The main action at Foxwoods and everywhere in the U.S. casino market, though, is slots, which in most casinos account for at least 70 percent of gambling revenues.   

          Foxwoods agreed to pay the state 25 percent of the “hold” from slot machines — the money that gamblers put in and is not returned to them in winnings. While casino opponents in Connecticut have attributed increased traffic, crime and gambling addiction to Foxwoods and Mohegan, those problems would have to be breathtakingly deep and costly to equal the dollars that have flowed to the state.

          In January, Mohegan’s hold from its slots was $52 million; Foxwoods’s was $46 million. Connecticut’s share from both came to $24.8 million. Over the last two decades, the monthly payments have added about $6 billion to the state treasury. About half of that is estimated to have come from out-of-state residents, the majority of them from Massachusetts and New York. “Some states weren’t paying attention — they just thought Indian casinos were going to be big bingo halls,” Clyde W. Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and an expert on the New England casino market, told me. “Connecticut was ahead of the game. They understood the potential.”

          Non-Indian gambling operations, known as commercial casinos, have multiplied in every region of the country: from the stolid Midwest, where Iowa alone has 17 commercial casinos, to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, which has become a mini-Las Vegas, to the mid-Atlantic region, the latest boom market. A proposed $1 billion casino in Maryland has attracted powerful business and political support. It would be on the banks of the Potomac, about 10 miles south of the White House.

          Most people probably would not guess which state reaps the most revenue from its casinos. It is Pennsylvania, which in 2010 collected $1.3 billion from slots and table-game revenues. The state had just 10 casinos, but Rendell negotiated an agreement that requires them to turn over 55 percent of the hold from their slots to the state — an advantageous deal for the public and one that showed other states what casino owners will tolerate to gain entry into a market. “It is considered a privilege to be in this industry, and we pay for that privilege in very high taxes,” Frank Fahrenkopf, the president of the American Gaming Association, told me when I visited his office in Washington.

          The silver-haired Fahrenkopf, a chairman of the Republican National Committee in the Reagan years, is known as an adroit Washington player, the type who can make light of his high status while also fully inhabiting it. He showed me what he called his “I love me” wall, pictures of him with other important people. “Everybody in Washington has to have one,” he said. “That’s me with Helmut and Margaret,” he said of one picture, signaling his first-name relationships with Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher.

          The A.G.A. represents only commercial casinos, 566 of them in 22 states. An economic impact study commissioned by the organization last year counted $34.6 billion in nationwide gambling revenues in 2010. That represents money that individuals bet, lost and left behind in casinos. According to the study, casinos supported 820,000 jobs, created $125 billion in spending and accounted for close to 1 percent of the U.S. gross-domestic product. (Those figures come from only commercial casinos. Foxwoods, Mohegan and other Indian casinos were not included.) “I know there are people who hate this industry and who are always going to hate this industry,” Fahrenkopf said. “If you look at polling, it’s a solid 15 percent, and the other 85 percent are O.K. with it. But you see the contribution we make, in terms of jobs, and the taxes we pay. We’re proud of that.”

          The name of the organization Fahrenkopf leads, the American Gaming Association, drops the “b” and the “l” from “gambling.” In fact, no one in the casino business says “gambling.” They are in the business of “gaming” — an enterprise that could not exist without euphemisms and various legal workarounds. There are, for example, the so-called riverboat casinos that get around prohibitions against gambling on land; most of the boats never leave the shoreline. Some Midwest casinos are plopped down in shallow water in concrete basins and are known as “boats in a moat.”

          ...A casino floor can seem like a throwback to a time decades ago when personal habits were judged less harshly and physical fitness was not considered such a virtue. “Sometimes, it’s a beautiful day out, and you think to yourself, Oh, God, nobody’s going to come in here,” Scott Butera told me in one of our conversations. “But they do. Our crowd wants to sit in front of a slot machine, smoke a cigarette and drink. They’re not going water skiing out at Mystic Seaport.”

          A substantial number of casino patrons have mobility issues, and you see a lot of wheelchairs. People who work on casino floors take pride in getting to know their regular customers, the names of their children and grandchildren and even their health issues. “You look around here, and 45 is young,” Butera said as we walked between rows of slots at Foxwoods.

          The slot machines themselves, in the cartoonish and often hilarious political incorrectness of their imagery, hark back to some other era — for example, crudely drawn geishas, Asian “emperors” and a “bandito” in a game called More Chilis that would embarrass the proprietor of the lowest-end Tex-Mex joint you can imagine. At the casino industry’s big annual convention in Las Vegas, which is in part a trade show for slots manufacturers, a machine called Girls Day Out included a leather purse and a purple cocktail dress among its spinning icons. The featured icons in its companion game, Guys Night, were things meant to get men excited: dancing girls, cigars, overstuffed hamburgers. The big new rollout at the show was a “Ghostbusters” slot machine, a homage to the 1984 movie. The game’s audio played a section of dialogue from the movie, which seemed like a sly insertion of the designers’ dark humor: “We’d like to get a sample of your brain tissue.”

          At the annual Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas last October, I listened as A. K. Singh, a mathematician and professor of gaming at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, advised a roomful of casino executives that they could probably increase the hold on their slot machines by a percentage point or two without losing business. He said that some academic literature suggested that skilled slots players would notice, but he disagreed. “What is a skilled player?” he said with a laugh. “There is no skill.”

          The difference between table games and slot machines is that slots are entirely predictable. They’re like A.T.M.’s, but in reverse — programmed to take money from players, usually about 9 cents of every dollar wagered, while producing frequent near misses, the illusion that a big jackpot was at hand if only, say, just one more overstuffed burger had landed on the pay line. The lower the house’s hold on a slot machine — and the higher the number of small payouts — the longer a player’s T.O.D. (time on device). It’s a fine balance. Casinos want customers to lose their money, but not so rapidly that they’ll feel the whole experience was a bummer and not want to return.

          The gaming confab, known as G2E, offers a sort of crash course in the state of the industry. “We have the power to control luck,” Michael Meczka, a veteran casino marketing consultant from Los Angeles, said at another session. But much of the rest of his presentation was about the uncertainty gripping the business, what casinos cannot control. His remarks, in fact, were a bit grim — they reminded me of the despair you hear in the newspaper business over the advanced age of the core customers and the fear that younger people do not like the product enough to replace them.

             ...The big buzzword in the business right now is “cannibalization.” It refers, in this context, to casinos’ gobbling up one anothers’ customers, which for some of them may be the only route to survival. Fahrenkopf, the A.G.A. president, said he was not worried. “What about Starbucks?” he said as I sat in his Washington office. “A block east of here, a block west, a block north is a Starbucks. How much is too much? The market will decide.”

          Las Vegas, still the anchor of the gambling industry in the U.S., was battered by the recession, and its revenues from gambling still lag far behind 2007 levels. The city’s recovery could be hurt by a building boom in big Indian casinos in California — and, over time, by new properties in New York, Massachusetts and other Northeast states. The biggest winner in Las Vegas in recent years has been Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the company that owns the Venetian, but what has made him one of the wealthiest men in the world is not his U.S. holdings but his ownership of hugely profitable casinos in the Chinese territory of Macao. (Adelson has been in the news recently because he and his wife have contributed more than $10 million to support Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.)

          Farhrenkopf acknowledged that when the market does decide, it can have adverse consequences — in Atlantic City, for example, where casino revenue is down 37 percent since 2006 and the city’s future as a gambling mecca is very much in doubt. Rooms at hotel casinos have been going for as little as $19 a night. At least four casinos have been in bankruptcy, and people are no longer crowding onto buses to head south down the Atlantic City Expressway. “The Pennsylvania casinos are killing Atlantic City,” he said. “That’s where the Philadelphia market used to go, but now they can stay home.”

          It’s that specter — once-loyal players who disappear — that Foxwoods must worry about. At the Las Vegas conference, Meczka said that when people in the industry tell him they want new customers, his response is: “There aren’t any new customers out there. Gaming is an aged community. . . . Anyone who has ever wanted to try a casino has tried a casino.” In other words, the market is not expanding — only the venues meant to cater to a finite number of gamblers.

          When I toured Foxwoods with Christopher O’Connell, the vice president for hotel operations, we looked at some of the back-room operations: a call center, where about 130 people, divided among three shifts, book reservations and answer other inquiries; a corridor with a long line of lockers, where dealers store their personal belongings; cafeterias that serve about 5,000 meals a day to employees. In better economic times, these might seem like lower-level service-industry jobs. In the current climate, they just looked like jobs....