Spectrum wrote:Since the tax rate for married couples is lower than singles, I'm curious on how allowing same sex marriages will change the budget for next year.
I don't think its going to have any significantly measurable effect.
A quick Google search led me to a
Washington Post article that cited Gallup poll that estimated there were about 390,000 married same-sex couples in the country, and another 1.2 million adults living in a same-sex domestic partnerships. This was written before
Obergefell v. Hodges was decided and the article estimates that
Obergefell would lead to a big jump in same-sex marriages... Which seems a safe assumption.
Nevertheless, I think that its highly unlikely we'd see
that many more same-sex marriages. I mean, there's only so many LGBT folks out there and the number of them that marry will never be 100%. So even if we're super liberal with our estimates as assume all existing same-sex domestic partnerships become marriages and the number of same-sex marriages doubles... You're looking at maybe one million marriages.
According to the
statistics I can quickly find, number of married couples in the United States totaled some 59.63 million pairs in 2014. Adding another million couples to that is not a statistically significant shift.
On the other hand, it does remind me of a cartoon that the first attorney I ever worked for had taped to the fridge in the break room: Two men are talking to each other on the court house steps. "I can't wait for same-sex marriage to become legal." "I didn't know you were gay?" "I'm not. I'm a divorce lawyer."