Gay-married couples in the U.S. really are richer on the whole
The founding purpose of this project was to counter the myth – the outright lie – that “gays” are a “lucrative” market. Recent evidence about incomes of American married gay and lesbian couples proves that the groups I just mentioned really are richer than straight couples on the whole. For American gays and lesbians, gay marriage has become a luxury good.
Data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis publishes its own research. One paper, from 2016, is entitled “Joint Filing by Same-Sex Couples after Windsor: Characteristics of Married Tax Filers in 2013 and 2014.” In it, coauthors Robin Fisher, Geof Gee, and Adam Looney analyze income-tax data from the year gay marriage was legalized nationwide in the United States (2013) and the year after.
The paper is atrociously typeset and almost impossible to read. I’ll give you two versions:
Tagged PDF with bookmark to numerical tables
HTML version of main paper (no footnotes, endnotes, or tables; some elisions)
General findings
Only in the middle income bracket ($50,000 to $74,999) are same-sex couples worse off. Otherwise, both gay and lesbian married couples are always less poor or more rich, depending on the income bracket.
The two years that were surveyed in the paper vary by exactly one percentage point in the next income bracket up from the one I just mentioned ($75,000 to $99,999). In 2014, gay and lesbian married couples were that one percentage point less likely to be in that income bracket. That makes them almost the same as opposite-sex married couples when viewed over the two years in question. In most parts of the U.S., $75,000 is a good income and a buck short of a hundred grand is a very good income.
But to say the same thing again, overall gay and lesbian married couples were less poor when the incomes being examined were low and more rich when the incomes were high.
Gay marriage: In the United States, it’s a nice perq to have if you’re already doing well financially.
Posted: 2017.03.29