A duo of financial specialists from the New York Times recently explored exactly how much extra funds gay couples may relinquish during their lifetimes as opposed to straight couples — which, in some cases, was found to be nearly half a million dollars.
Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber tackled this hypothetical experiment by examining many different monetary factors: income taxes, Social Security and health insurance, among others. In many of these categories, same-sex partners lack the reduced-cost benefits of their heterosexual counterparts.
By modeling several potential scenarios surrounding modern gay couples, the two financial analysts were able to come up with a few concrete figures to satisfy their curiosity.
“In our worst case, the couple’s lifetime cost of being gay was $467,562,” Bernard and Lieber explained. “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.”
Of course, in the journalists’ opinions, this price tag on gay households would drop drastically should the federal government choose to recognize gay marriage. In fact, the only area that wouldn’t be softened by such a political turnaround would be the cost of biologically producing offspring.
Read the full article here.
— Zachary Culler
