Viva Las Vegas! Viva America!

A British couple strolls around the corner from St. Mark's Square and asks for a canal-side table. On this glorious day—temperature in the low 70s, blue sky overhead—they join the mobs dining alfresco, watching as the gondolas drift by. Never mind that this Venice is an enclosed mall in the Venetian resort in Las Vegas, and the cerulean sky is painted overhead. For tourists like these, gambling is practically an afterthought. In the faux Venice, you can shop at Banana Republic, take in Wayne Brady's variety act and sample the fare of enough celebrity chefs to stock a rival to the Food Network. All without having to bother with the pernicious influences of fresh air and sunlight.

Viva Las Vegas!

A brief sojourn in the new Las Vegas, where growth is booming but you have to search a bit to find the blackjack tables, raises a few questions. Is gambling played out in its historical capital? Now that it has gone mainstream, is gambling a discretionary-spending industry, tethered to the flagging fortunes of the American consumer? And, really, just how much of Céline Dion can one city take?

Gambling may be many things: a bad habit, an addiction to some, a sin to others. In America, it's a massive industry that shows no signs of flagging, despite the economic headwinds. "During the Great Depression and previous recessions people would always save enough to go to the movies," said Frank Fahrenkopf, chairman of the American Gaming Association in Washington, D.C. "The same is true today. People save their money to go to the casinos."

Just how much do Americans fritter away on losers' bets? About 0.7 percent of the nation's GDP. Last year, 460 commercial casinos in 11 states employed 366,197 people, according to the American Gaming Association. That doesn't include the 372 Indian casinos in 28 states. Throw in horse racing and lotteries (42 states and the District of Columbia), and every state save Utah and Hawaii has some form of legal gaming. Analyst Eugene Christiansen says that the industry's take—net sales of casinos, lotteries, etc., after accounting for winnings—was about $91 billion in 2006, up 7.7 percent from 2005. (These figures do not include ubiquitous but illegal NCAA basketball pools.) For comparison's sake, $91 billion is about what Americans spend on soft drinks each year, or the annual sales of Home Depot, or Egypt's gross domestic product. (Or, given the weak dollar, what you'll spend on five nights in a hotel, a few slices of pizza and a gelato in the real Venice.)

Legalized gambling has grown at a faster rate than the overall economy for the past few decades in part because it's a relatively young industry; Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo casino in Vegas in 1946. "For virtually all of history, there's been more demand than supply," notes Christiansen. And as older iterations matured, like horse racing and lotteries, casinos picked up the slack.