Study: Gay marriage would bring cash to Nev.
By Wesley Juhl, Las Vegas Review-Journal
If Nevada were to legalize same-sex marriages, the state would see significant economic benefits, a report released last week found.
In the first three years that same-sex couples could marry, Nevada’s wedding and tourism industries could see spending rise between $23 million and $52 million, which would raise state and local tax revenues between $1.8 million and $4.2 million, according to the report by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law.
The institute tracked economic and census data from states that have legalized same-sex marriage and applied those trends to Nevada. If the Silver State follows suit, it could reap millions of dollars of taxable revenue, the report said.
Nevada has 7,140 same-sex couples living in the state, according to census data. If gay and lesbian couples married in Nevada at the same rate as those in Massachusetts a decade ago, half of Nevada’s LGBT couples would marry in the first three years, the report found.
Nevada has a history of looking a gift horse in the mouth. When brothel workers a few years back offered up a $5 per brothel transaction tax the Republican controlled legislature of the day felt it wouldn’t be morally acceptable to allow the state to benefit from LEGAL prostitution. How ironic.
How do you figure the Rs controlled the legislature? The Speaker, Barbara Buckley, was a Democrat. And she was very much against accepting the tax, too.
Nope. The state of Nevada may have had a Republican governor, but the legislature was overwhelmingly Democrat.