I have to write this quickly since I am on my lunch break, so I'll try to be succinct. I cannot tell you how many times economists have concluded that gay marriage would be beneficial for the economic well-being of LGBT Americans and for aggregate GDP expansion. However, the Justice Department of the Obama Administration would like you to think otherwise. Their June 6th brief said that DOMA saves the government money by not having to pay marriage benefits under federal law, which in turn, “preserves scarce government resources.” This allegation that gay marriage somehow misallocates government resources is false, and that their assessment of DOMA evokes images of incest and child marriage to describe gay marriage makes the Justice Department look grossly homophobic.
M.V. Lee Badgett, one of the few leading experts on the economics of LGBT life, along with a few research cohorts released a new report from the Williams Institute in April 2009 that refutes the Justice Department's allegation. Their analysis concludes that if Maine were to legalize same-sex marriage the state's budge would increase by $7.9 million per year and this is a conservative estimate. Maine is scheduled to permit same-sex marriages beginning around Septemeber 2009, contingent upon a pending possible people's veto. At the same time, M.V. Lee Badgett again estimates that gay marriage in the past five years since its inception in Massachussets has pumped $111 million dollars into the state's GDP.
Let me try to illustrate the aggregate fiscal effect of legalizing gay marriage. I am going to give you a crude estimate of how much money could have been pumped into the federal economy if all 50 states had tapped into the gay wedding market in 2004. By multiplying $111 million times 50 (for each state in the union) I suspect, as a conservative estimate, that $5.55 billion would have been pumped into the economy over the past five years. Again, this estimate is crude, underestimated and ignores the idiosyncrasies of each state, annual inflation and discounting. Nevertheless, you can see that the US economy has lost a healthy source of income over the past five years.
And, to the Justice Department, do yourself some justice and get your facts straight.
Do you think gay marriage makes cents now?
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In view of the fact that many companies and government agencies now provide for "domestic benefits" for gay couples I don't see how providing marriage benefits for gay couples would result in wasting "scarce" economic resources. Regardless of economics, marriage is a fundamental right and other than prohibiting marriage between say sibs and first cousins because of proven serious genetic defects in offspring, no government should have the right to tell people who they can and can't marry simply because of their sexual orientation.
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