Josh Barro, Columnist

What Is the Fiscal Impact of Gay Marriage?

Same-sex marriage won't balance the budget, but it will help -- and the reason should please conservatives.

March 26, 2013 at 4:00 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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As the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in today's Proposition 8 case, a lot of people have the same question for the gay fiscal-policy writer: How would same-sex marriage affect government budgets? There's been a surprisingly large amount of research into this question, and the answer is that same-sex marriage would probably improve governments' fiscal situations a little.

The Congressional Budget Office looked into the question in 2004 at the request of Republican Representative Steve Chabot of Ohio. The CBO's findings suggest that federally recognized gay marriage would reduce the budget deficit by about $450 million a year, or roughly 0.01 percent of total federal spending. So, I'm sorry, straight America: We're not going to balance your budget by getting married, but we'll help a little bit.