On Tuesday members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted 102-88 to send a revenue bill to the Senate that would rely on borrowing, new taxes and various accounting maneuvers to balance a $32 billion budget that’s been incomplete from the very beginning.

There’s not much to like in the House’s plan, which doesn’t actually fix anything and instead relies on $1.5 billion in borrowing to do most of the heavy lifting. But the cherry on top is an expansion of legalized gambling that House members are convinced, for some reason, will generate a robust $265 million in 2017 alone.

Don’t believe them. Lawmakers in the House did this once before. Last year, in fact, when they “balanced” the books using a $150 million gambling expansion that — whoops! — was never actually implemented.

As a result the state’s 2016-17 budget fell even further out of balance, which helped give us the $2 billion deficit lawmakers have been struggling for months to deal with.

We’ve said this before: gimmicks, tricks and rose-colored projections are no way to balance the state budget.

Is that all the House has in its toolbox?

Because that’s exactly what the proposed gambling expansion, which would allow video gaming terminals at bars, restaurants and private clubs, amounts to. It’s a predatory approach to generating revenue that is too unstable and ill-conceived to actually be useful.

Will proponents of the expansion guarantee that adding as many as 13,000 terminals across the state won’t cannibalize revenue from the state’s 12 existing casinos? Because that revenue — $3.3 billion last year, $1.4 billion of which went to the state — is actually a known quantity.

Will they guarantee that these slot-like terminals will actually reach a heretofore-untapped audience? Because last year slots revenue in Pennsylvania actually declined by 2.2 percent.

Will they guarantee that the revenue generated by this expansion will be stable and predictable? Because gambling is affected by economic conditions. What happens when the economy experiences another downturn?

If legislators attempt to guarantee these things, they’ll be lying. There are no guarantees when it comes to gambling. You simply roll the dice and live with the number of pips that turn up.

That’s fine if the context is a week in Las Vegas or an evening trip to The Rivers in Pittsburgh, but it’s no way to balance a budget or find revenue for essential government services.

The state needs a revenue plan, not empty promises that legislators have already failed once to deliver on.

Legislators need to make hard decisions, not rose-colored projections.

Pennsylvania needs a full and complete budget. Not the sham lawmakers approved in June and haven’t deigned to finish since.