As my wife and I crawled though bumper to bumper traffic on I-78 near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, I noticed a series of flashy billboards for an enormous new casino. Apparently, it had been built on the very site of Bethlehem Steel’s major American plant. A casino where Bethlehem Steel stood? Really?

At one point in the 1950’s, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation produced 23 million tons of steel each year, employing over 150,000 people. Bethlehem Steel’s products were used to build the George Washington Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam, not to mention rebuilding post-war Germany and Japan. But as Europe and Asia recovered from the destruction of the war, they began to compete instead of import. American manufacturing fell behind and mills began to close. In 2001, Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy.

So what was our response? New industry? A haven for green manufacturing? So much potential for the sprawling site, hallowed in American industrial history. Wait, how about a casino?

The President of the Sand’s Casino Corporation, developer of the cavernous new gaming hall, says, "The whole Bethlehem Steel story was the building and defending of America, and we wanted to respect that story through the architecture and design of the property.” Great! So they kept the bread and threw away the meat.

Here’s the catch: casinos don’t produce anything. Without going into the moral issues of gambling, they simply don’t produce anything that actually contributes to the American economy. You can’t compare the steel that rolled out of the mills to the gamblers that fall out of their chairs. Very little enters the economy when gamblers are done: employment pay (most at minimum wage), some tax revenues to the state, and profits that go back to Las Vegas.

The federal government became involved with the gambling industry at one point back in 1996, trying to see if gambling provided any benefit to the national economy. Congress created the “National Gambling Impact Study Commission” to try to figure it out. At their conclusion the commission recommended all new casino development be halted, at least until there was clear proof that casinos did any good. But guess what? No one listened. And casinos have been growing. Between 1990 and 2008, commercial casino revenues increased from $8.7 billion to over $98 billion. The number of casinos rose from 26 to almost 460 in the same time. That’s amazing growth! And it’s economic foolishness, as most of the casinos being developed are built in the name of “economic redevelopment.” Creating entry level food service jobs and taxing the mathematically incompetent. Some development.

In another study by Earl L. Grinols and David B. Mustard, published in Journal of Managerial and Decision Economics, “there is abundant evidence that increased gambling opportunities increase problem and pathological gambling.” For example, the NGISC reported that “the presence of a casino within 50 miles roughly doubled the prevalence of problem and pathological gambling.” They go on to note that “an average adult is expected to lose $200–300 each year in casinos if they are nearby, while a typical pathological gambler often loses 10–20 times this amount. Therefore, a small number of pathological gamblers accounts for a significant portion of casino revenues.” Wow. Do you see how it works? You build it, they come, you make money, they get addicted, you make more money, everyone is happy. As long as the taxes keep flowing, that is.

President Obama has started a nationwide discussion on new green industries, creating jobs through businesses that are connected to the 21st century. Green energy development, entrepreneurial applications of new technology, biotechnology. America must work to develop a vision for replacing smoke stack jobs with long term industries that provide sustained growth, real economic sustenance, and strong tax revenue. Casinos are not economic development. They are an economic sham that replaces steel with slots, producing nothing more than fool’s gold.