Economic Impact of Gay Marriage

With the President’s recent endorsement of Same-Sex marriage and the subsequent vitriolic condemnation for the right, I figured now would be a good time rise above the demagoguery and take a different look at what gay marriage would mean. Specifically, I want to see what the economic impact gay marriage would be, if any. To do this I had to collect a couple of statistics: percentage of the population that is homosexual (H), current US population (U), percentage of the population that marries per year (M), and the average cost of a wedding (W).

H: Percentage of the population that is homosexual

This is actually a pretty difficult figure to determine. Different surveys and polls fluctuate between 2% to 25%. Alfred Kinsey pegged the figure at 10% in his book 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. In 2008, Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion conducted the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, determining that 7% of women and 8% of men identify as either homosexual or bi-sexual. For simplicity I’ll just average this figure to 7.5%.

U: current US population

Based on the 2010 US Census the current US population is 313.5 million people.

M: Percentage of the population that gets married per year

According to the US Census 2.2 million marriages occurred in 2009. If we divide 2.2 million by the US population (313.5 million) we can determine the percentage of the population that gets married per year. 2.2/313.5= .007, meaning that every year .7% of the US population gets married. Since there really isn’t any reason to assume that homosexual couples would marry at significantly different rates than their straight counter parts, we can extrapolate this .7% to same-sex couples  (the real rate would be higher if anything since many long term couples have been denied the right, for decades in some cases, resulting in a surge of weddings upon legalization).

W: Average cost a wedding

Reuters  did all the heavy lifting for me regarding data collection. Unsurprisingly New York averages the most expensive weddings at over $65 thousand and West Virginia was the lowest at $14 thousand. The national average is $27,017. This number only covers the ceremony itself; the honeymoon and guest expenses are not included. As with our M statistic, there is no reason to assume that same-sex couples would spend any less on their weddings.

With our statistic in hand, we can now develop a formula:

H*U*M*W=Economic Impact of Gay Marriage per year

7.5%*313.5 million*.7%*27,017= $4,446,660,488

In case you’re having difficulty reading that number above, it says 4.4 BILLION dollars. That’s billion with a big ass B. Remember, this is just covering the impact of same-sex weddings. I haven’t even delved into what impact same-sex divorce would have. Weddings remain a local affair so this is money that goes directly to small businesses across America: bakers, dressmakers, florists, caterers, wedding planners, etc. While none of my calculations were extremely rigorous, they do provide a rough estimate of what would happen, and I’d call 4.4 billion dollars one hell of a stimulus package.