Kyle Reese wrote:Wade, I'm surprised that you haven't been called out yet for some of your questionable math skills and/or your logical reasoning with regard to the consequence of "costly gov expansion". You state "where benefits of same-sex marriage to gay couples are said to be as high as $500,000.00 over their lifetime"
Are you implying that the cost to the government is that much for each SSM couple?
Here is what I explicitly indicated in my article: "using the figures reported by gay advocates...". So, the implication isn't mine, but that of the gay advocates I cited.
Digging into your sources, we read "In our worst case, the couple’s lifetime cost of being gay was $467,562. But the number fell to $41,196 in the best case for a couple with significantly better health insurance, plus lower taxes and other costs."
(Are you rounding $467k up to $500k?)
No. That is the work of the Williams Institute, a gay-advocacy think tank I cited.
Furthermore, the source article is referring to the out of pocket costs to a SSM couple, including such things as artificial insemination fees ($40k), moving fees ($20k) to a ssm friendly state, tax preparation fees ($12k), lower IRA savings opportunities ($48k-$112k), etc. These are hardly costs that would be passed onto the government in a SSM situation.
Good find. It clearly draws into question the credibility of the gay-advocacy source whose figures I employed.
To be clear, the reason I used the figures from gay advocates wasn't because I felt they were accurate, but because I didn't want the main point of my piece to become obscured by tangential disputes over numbers. I presumed that my pro-SSM audience wouldn't get hung up on figures provided by their own side, and even if someone did (as with you), it would reflect poorly on the gay advocate sources rather than on me and my article.
Thanks, -Wade Englund-