Casinos are not eligible for federal bailout funds. But in these desperate times there are easy fixes to generate more revenue in Sin City. Of course, most involve increasing the sin. I do not think all of these things should take place. They are suggestions. I am not really in favor of letting teenagers gamble. On the other hand, as Vegas crashes and burns, I thought I would throw out five previously taboo ideas that have been hinted at in various conversations, bills that died in committee, and suggestions I am hearing around town over the last few months.

But I have left the two of the most obvious ideas people have offered me off this list. Legalizing marijuana is the most popular suggestion to increase revenue in Vegas. It is the first thing most people say. And  yet no one in power is suggesting this idea. Vegas has no tradition or infrastructure for legal marijuana to happen. (Even our medical marijuana law, totally different than the one in California, is so complex that it is virtually unusable by people who qualify.) Marijuana is not shovel-ready.

The other suggestion I have left out involves the legalization of Internet gambling. I do not have a position on this issue. But while it may be of great benefit to casino companies, it is less clear to me how this will benefit Las Vegas.

1. Gay Marriage: Everyone knows about marriage in Vegas. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, because of the number of locals also getting licenses, is not clear how many tourists are married here annually. But the answer is a lot. You probably know someone who was married here. It is rare to spend time in a casino and not see a bride. Obviously in addition to Nevada, gay marriage would need to be done on a national level to really impact Vegas. But there is no single move that would be more beneficial to the Las Vegas economy. Wedding money works its way all through Vegas, from flower shops to photographers to limo drivers.

2. Legal prostitution: In another city this should be controversial. That this is a huge third rail in Vegas is actually surprising. After all, legal brothels exist just across the county line, most tourists think prostitution is legal here anyway, and illegal prostitution is a huge and totally unregulated local industry here. And it is the worst kind of business, keeping pimps employed and allowing underage women to be exploited. If there is one city in this country set up to legalize and regulate prostitution, it is Las Vegas.

3: Lower the gambling age to 18. You can drive; you can vote; you can fight in a war. The logic here is obvious. But while you can gamble at tribal casinos in the area, Las Vegas casinos are prohibited from permiting anyone under 21 to gamble.

4: Allow strip clubs in resorts: There are topless bars and fully nude juice bars all over Vegas. The result has been corruption, from doormen at resorts taking kickbacks from limo drivers to taxi cabs demanding bounties from topless bars for delivering fare-paying clients, to city councilmen going to jail. Vegas resorts have been pushing toward this line for a while, most recently with the Sapphire pool at the Rio, ostensibly the place the Sapphire dancers hang out. Now may be time to cross the line. Certainly  resorts have better security, better regulated owners and more carefully scrutinized business practices. Resorts already include topless shows. Still, there is a tradition of keeping our vices separate in Vegas. Gambling and lap dances should be a cab ride apart. But certainly the clubs on Industrial Avenue will always offer the more extreme experience. And with a ballooning state deficit and resorts drowning in debt, why be prudish? Vegas has topless bars and resorts already; if you put them together you can regulate them better and tax them more.

5. Make things cheap again: This is not my idea. Last month for Las Vegas Weekly  I did a profile of Anthony Curtis, the gambling consumer activist who publishes Las Vegas Advisor. I asked him to look at things from the casino's perspective, in terms of how they can make profits grow again. To Curtis the mistake is when casinos started to make everything from shows to shopping profitable. The things casinos really make money on is gambling. Curtis feels the resorts in Vegas forgot that. Yes, you can charge a guy $30 to enter a pool and spend the day watching women in bikinis. Or you can get the same customer to spend hundreds in a nightclub. But if the person played craps all day or night, the casino would be in better shape. According to Curtis:

“Casinos are doing something very stupid. They only have the first part of the equation right, which is they are discounting to fill rooms. But they are trying to hide where they are cutting back, and that is to the gambler. And the gambler will feel it with reduced payback and reduced comp policies. But they should be going back to the old model where the profit center is the casino itself. They can’t maintain profits in other areas, because people aren’t that stupid. Bring them in and break even on other things, essentially, and earn your money in the casino.”

Photo: Sarah Gerke

The mob had a chance; then the large corporations had their time. Now, is it the bankers' turn? Seriously, is it time for bankers, the people getting bailouts, to run Vegas' casinos? A bank already controls the yet-to-be-completed Cosmopolitan on the Strip, and others may follow.

Can Las Vegas really wind up in the hands of bankers? Nowadays, it seems possible with words like "bankruptcy" and "default" floating around many of the town's big players. The irony is that if the resort companies drown in their debts, the winners will be the banks that should not have loaned them so much money that the companies collapsed under the obligations. How could the reward for what, in retrospect, looks like some poor lending decisions possibly be ownership of large parts of the Las Vegas Strip? 

Today the Review-Journal looks at the possibility of a financial meltdown because of debt in a story on MGM-Mirage, the largest employer in town, with 10 resorts. Also, today the company that owns Riviera slipped into something called "technical default" to Wachovia. The Station and Boyd situation continues to play out to no benefit for either company. For Station there is the worry of how it will pay existing debt, and for Boyd there is concern over the debt it wants to take on for the purchase of Station casinos. Harrah's bonds are also down, reportedly over fears that the company could default. Las Vegas Sands (owner of Venetian and Palazzo) is also in the news, making moves trying to avoid default.

Two scary thoughts: What would bankers do with Las Vegas? And what would Las Vegas be like if run by bankers? (photo by Sarah Gerke)

What happened to wild 2007? Where did all the crazy people renting Hummers go?

The first time I heard the word "recession" after I moved to Vegas in July 1999, shortly before the dot-com bust, it was to assure me that Vegas was recession-proof. And for the most part that turned out to be true. Not too long ago, I recalled on the Buffet how the effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were short-lived here. And, indeed, as late as August I was still wondering if a slowdown was "possible" in Vegas. Well, we can now see I majored in English.

But back in those innocent days, earlier this fall, when I had never heard about terms of art and jargon from Wall Street like "liquidity crisis," there was still a sense in town that even if the rest of the country had a recession, Vegas would be minimally affected. The reason was that unlike the rest of you, in Vegas economic problems had an obvious expiration date with new huge resorts -- meaning massive local employment and more tourists -- headed to the Strip over the next few years: Echelon, CityCenter, Plaza and, in the deeper distance, though granted not guaranteed, creatures like the proposed Elvis-themed hotel, another sponsored by an Australian billionaire and, most anticipated, a major redevelopment project expected to be announced by Harrah's for its carefully and expensively assembled parcel of the Strip casinos starting at the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevard.

The projects in the distance, of course, never materialized, and then things got worse. The new reality is that Echelon construction has been temporarily suspended by parent company Boyds. Plaza has announced the year it will open, but why bother telling you that when they haven't announced any financing to build it? Even the well-underway CityCenter has yet to announce secured financing for its final phase of construction.

Some of the latest horrid economic news for Vegas is that Strip casino winnings numbers released for August on Thursday have declined for an unprecedented eight months in a row: $494 million down, or 7.4%, from last year.

To take one example of how quickly things are changing in Vegas, the Review-Journal looks at the billions lost just by Venetian and Palazzo owner Sheldon Adelson in the declining stock value of his shares of parent company Las Vegas Sands.

To give you a sense of how things can appear on the ground: One show, "Point Break Live!" at the V Theater at Planet Hollywood, may have set some sort of record by closing within a week of opening. I have certainly noticed the slowdown in my work.

If you do feel like a vacation in Vegas, check out any of the major travel sites right now, and with some searching you will find prices on some Strip rooms that reflect the rates of three or four years ago more than they do what was being charged last year. Vegas these days is remembering that this used to be known as a bargain vacation.

And returning to offering bargains may be one of the ways Vegas might deal with the uncertain times ahead.

Don't get me wrong, Vegas still has a lot of people coming. My visit to Pure on Tuesday found the lines as long as ever. But that in some ways disguises part of the problem. As I have written here before, the ability to adjust room rates keeps hotels fairly crowded. But the problem is that those people are not blowing money like they used to do.

And Vegas is still growing and growing fast. There is a lot happening in Vegas compared with other cities. Steve Wynn has Encore opening in December, for example. Other new resorts opening in the foreseeable future include Aliante Station and M. True, both are locally focused, but they are still upscale properties that will appeal to tourists and offer hundreds of hotel rooms, new venues, restaurants and more shopping along with creating hundreds of jobs.

But the "If you build it, they will come" model that Vegas has accepted as doctrine seems to be facing challenges.

So here is the question: What should Vegas do to get people to waste money on stuff they don't need, to drink and eat to unhealthy extremes and, of course, to gamble what is left of their money as if it was still the good old days of 2007? If that seems to be an impossible dream in days like the last several weeks, well then you have underestimated Vegas. But just as clear is that Vegas cannot afford to overestimate itself anymore.

Photo: Sarah Gerke

There is so much reporting involved in this story that I am not sure if I will have it ready this month. I have started to work on a Sunday Calendar column that tries to pick the winners and losers in the Vegas high-end luxury condo market.

A little more than year ago it seemed high rise project after project was announced and then many of them got postponed, canceled or scaled back. In fact, far more have been canceled than built. Two famous losers so far include Ivana Trump and George Clooney, both of whom lent their celebrity to failed projects.

The big picture seems to be that the casino resorts like MGM's CityCenter and Echelon Place as well expansions at Venetian and Wynn have drained the skilled labor pool and driven up the cost of materials. Condo builders lack a gaming revenue stream and simply can't compete with the amount of money casinos can pump into construction.

I learned a couple basic homespun truths when I moved to Las Vegas:

1. When it comes to flooding on the street during rainstorms here, the water collects mainly in the right lane.
2. Our town is recession-proof. Or so I thought.

On Sept. 11, 2001, world events caused this town's unflagging optimism to briefly turn grim. If I correctly remember one telling statistic from fall of that year, there was a point where, briefly, the stock value of the entire Mandalay Group (which at the time owned among its properties Mandalay Bay, Luxor and Excalibur) dropped lower than the cost to build the Luxor. And there were layoffs at the major casinos followed by the Aladdin filing for bankruptcy.

But the economic aftermath of Sept. 11 proved short-lived here. Las Vegas has more or less spent the past four years existing under a presumption of endless growth. There has been the real estate boom, the high end condo boom, the nightclub boom, etc.

Planning in Las Vegas of all sorts — on a corporate, personal and governmental level — is all about being able to accommodate growth. But are we really recession proof? Gas prices are way up, which must matter to you who come here from California; two local casino companies (Boyd and Station) recently had disappointing casino openings (Red Rock Station and South Coast) reflected in their earnings reports; by general consensus the housing market is softening and high-rise condos are being canceled quicker than they are being built.

No one locally is putting all this together in any significant way. But the national media are starting to wonder. An article in the latest issue of Business Week, "Las Vegas Isn't Feeling So Flush," concludes: "Like it or not, Las Vegas seems poised for a slowdown." Is that possible?