Sensible Erection | Gay marriages expected to create wedding-related jobs in D.C.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Gay marriages expected to create wedding-related jobs in D.C.

quote [ Georgetown residents Christopher Cahill and Richard Marshall consider the $75,000 wedding that they're planning for June to be their own "personal stimulus package" for the District economy. ]

[politics] [by f00m@nB@r@4:22pmGMT]

Comments

jaxtraw said @ 4:40pm GMT on 10th Mar
As somebody else said here recently, how the fuck did weddings get this expensive? Whatever happened to a nice little ceremony for the family and friends, and a buffet in your back garden?

Mr. Langosta said @ 5:15pm GMT on 10th Mar
cottage industry boomed into a consumer-driven monster, I guess. The money was just waiting to be made.

Decades ago, the diamond engagement ring was marketed to us with similar success.

ENZ said @ 5:24pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
Shame probably keeps a lot of people from having small weddings. It's supposed to be about the glamor, the spectacle, a fucking pissing contest for brides to have with their friends and sisters/cousins. A notion reinforced on girls their entire lives that you're a special little princess, and if a man doesn't shower you with rose petals and diamonds on your "big day", he doesn't love you.

mrcucumber said @ 6:08pm GMT on 10th Mar
Actually, I disagree. While some people like you describe certainly exist, the wedding industry is just that. An industry, and price fixing occurs, pressures exerted onto families to "go the extra mile" since it's "your day." Catering is over the top(why do you think out of work actors prefer catering jobs? They pay like five times a waiter job for a shorter gig). Alcohol mark ups, overpaid wedding planners so you don't have to coordinate a party, and overpriced florists who know that you have no other choice are inflating the costs where even if you wanted to curtail spending, it won't happen unless you have under 10 or 15 guests.

ENZ said @ 6:15pm GMT on 10th Mar
That too, but if there wasn't such a cultural demand on fancy weddings, people would be more frugal. You can still have a wedding that circumvents the entire industry, it's just that people tend to think you're a cheap bastard for doing so.

jaxtraw said @ 6:18pm GMT on 10th Mar
"You can still have a wedding that circumvents the entire industry, it's just that people tend to think you're a cheap bastard for doing so."

What I was trying to say, but said much more succinctly.

jaxtraw said @ 6:17pm GMT on 10th Mar
I don't know if it's price fixing as such, since it's one of the freer markets in existence. Any group of companies who try to price fix can be easily undercut by a new competitor.

Perhaps there is the luxury product effect happening; that is people don't want "luxuries" to be cheap, because that implies that they are lower quality. For instance perfume is often predicated on being expensive rather than its particular smell. If an expensive perfume were sold for a dollar a gallon, it loses its "exclusive" aura. So strangely, it's customers colluding with producers to keep the price up. The primary part of the value to the customer is the price itself. Having an expensive wedding is the point of having an expensive wedding.

theolypse said @ 11:55pm GMT on 10th Mar
As an aside, that luxury effect takes advantage of underhanded psychological hacking that makes this market very much not free. Because freedom would mean full control of your rational faculties, which these emotional manipulations undermine.

swiggy said @ 9:25am GMT on 11th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
adult prom.

lilmookieesquire said @ 5:29pm GMT on 10th Mar
Hand of the free market?

mwoody said @ 5:58pm GMT on 10th Mar
"Get" this expensive? I was under the impression that the grand wedding was the traditional one, and the quiet little backyard ceremony was an invention of counterculture.

Bodnoirbabe said @ 6:21pm GMT on 10th Mar
Nope. Wedding's used to be business transactions usually. The ceremony would take place in the morning and everyone would have a nice lunch usually the parents house. If there was any party at all, it was on the night the wedding contracts were signed by the fathers.

Only royals and rich people had anything we'd consider a real wedding.

It's only within the last 80 years that weddings have started growing into huge affairs for all classes.

Bodnoirbabe said @ 6:16pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]
I was gonna go for the standard big wedding. Then when I was looking at invitations and realized the one's I wanted were $500, I started to reconsider my priorities.

So we took the money and bought a house and now we're eloping to Yosemite this April. So much less stress and more practical!

bruceski said @ 6:34pm GMT on 10th Mar
Mazel Tov!

the belt said @ 7:26pm GMT on 10th Mar
Yosemite rules. Do yourselves a favor and head up a trail more than 3 or 4 miles from the trailheads. Average tourists think the scenery and wildlife exists only along the roadway and you'll find some amazing beauty and solitude just by walking 45 minutes farther than them.

And congratulations!

Naruki said @ 3:32am GMT on 11th Mar
I suspect many of them think the wildlife is a lot less wild around the roadway, which is why they don't venture in.

sanepride said @ 9:38pm GMT on 10th Mar
Good call.

Nihil said @ 9:40pm GMT on 10th Mar
BEAR WEDDING!!

KingPellinore said @ 6:27pm GMT on 10th Mar
I dunno, but I have come to loathe the film "Father of the Bride" since it's basically a whole bunch of people telling Steve Martin he's a jerkass for not wanting to drop $100,000 on his daughter's wedding.

Naruki said @ 3:33am GMT on 11th Mar
On the other hand, he actually could drop that much.

theolypse said @ 11:52pm GMT on 10th Mar
My wife and I self-officiated with a couple of friends as witnesses in one of those friends' place of business. Cost us the licensing fee and took three minutes. She tells the story better than I do.

Viking_Biochemist said @ 6:31am GMT on 11th Mar
I had a registry office wedding, a big party in the back yard and a pre-wedding dinner for immediate rellies at a fancy restaurant (mainly so we didn't have to invite the grannies to the party).

It was about 50 times more awesome than a >$60 000 wedding I went to a couple of months later. Better ceremony, better food, better booze, more fun.

erich wiess said @ 4:48pm GMT on 10th Mar

Just think of the money to be made when they legalize polygamy.

Mr. Langosta said @ 5:12pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:2 Insightful]
Nah, it's a net loss when you factor in the group discount.

ComposerNate said @ 5:36pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]

GordonGuano said @ 6:03am GMT on 11th Mar
Two nutjobs and a jingle writer.

theolypse said @ 11:57pm GMT on 10th Mar
Damn the money. Think of the babes.

Mr. Langosta said @ 5:12pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
Simpsons did it.

lilmookieesquire said @ 5:29pm GMT on 10th Mar
If only California could somehow earn $75,000...

sanepride said @ 5:49pm GMT on 10th Mar
Gay people as a demographic are generally more affluent. They tend to be well-educated, professional, and often free of child-related expenses. From a socio-economic standpoint it's just idiotic to deny them the right to inject huge sums of money into the economy via lavish wedding expenses.

Now if we could only get around this whole 'destruction of the institution of marriage' thing...

jaxtraw said @ 5:58pm GMT on 10th Mar
Just to nitpick, they aren't "injecting" money into the economy. It's already there. A better phrase would be "the right to satisfy their desires and thus create value by freely trading with others".

;)

mrcucumber said @ 6:09pm GMT on 10th Mar
No.

jaxtraw said @ 6:13pm GMT on 10th Mar
No?

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:54pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:2 Insightful]
No.

FifthSpango said @ 6:38pm GMT on 10th Mar
To nitpick right back in return.

Although the actual narrow money base will be unaffected, it's not quite right to define this as "money" and leave it at that.

Fischers law tells us that money base x velocity of money is the money supply. Certainly having a relatively wealthy segment of the population (and thus, a low marginal propensity to consume one) send more will up the velocity of money and thus increase the money supply. Which could sensibly be called "injecting money into the economy".

Though, it's all semantics. And, really, I just like arguing with you :).

jaxtraw said @ 6:51pm GMT on 10th Mar
Interesting point, but it's worth asking what would happen to this money if they hadn't spent it on the wedding. Keynes threatens us with the horror that they would "hoard" it, but in practical terms, it would be in their bank accounts. That means the bank would have loaned it to somebody else, who would have spent it instead.

Also, I think you may be masking your feelings of infatuation with hostility.

FifthSpango said @ 7:00pm GMT on 10th Mar
Well, true enough.

But, banks are notoriously not lending at the moment. Indeed, the financial crisis itself is palpably a dramatic fall off in the velocity of money.

I find it hard to credit that persuading low marginal prop to spend groups to splash out some of their cash wealth on large ticket items (the providers of which are generally high prop to spend groups too) wouldn't drive the velocity of money up, at least short term.

Though, I suppose, it might just prolong the banks balance sheet repairing, and slow down longer term money velocity growth.

And, who's hiding anything. Arguing is like sex to me. Ask the uni debating club...

jaxtraw said @ 7:10pm GMT on 10th Mar
Banks are lending at the moment, the complaint is that they aren't lending at the excessive levels that preciptated the last crash (though not that far below, in toto) to various groups such as small businesses and, particularly, poor people who want large mortgages. The complaint is that they aren't doing enough to sustain bubble housing prices. They're certainly lending money, that's how the service interest payments on these guys' $75000 in their bank accounts. The point is that £75000 in a bank account doesn't just sit there idly. Deposits are out on loan, which is what causes bank runs :)

What's "missing" from the economy at the moment is excess lending, not cash itself. Indeed, what caused a lot of the crisis was the realisation that many of the banks' "reserves" were themselves just CDOs and other "non-money".

I think the point still stands, that cash doesn't go out of circulation because it's in the bank, because it's not in the bank at all. It's out in the economy somewhere.

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:55pm GMT on 10th Mar
Actually, the Canadian banking industry cane out a pretty boy out of all this.

jaxtraw said @ 7:58pm GMT on 10th Mar
There are bound to be some lucky winners somewhere in the system. Some financiers did pretty well out of it too.

Dioxin said @ 2:28am GMT on 11th Mar
The bankers who showed self restraint came out the "winners" by not being retarded with other people's money.

jaxtraw said @ 3:51am GMT on 11th Mar
...and to do that they had to resist the received wisdom and pressure from governments and central banks, which was to lend indiscriminately because "boom and bust was a thing of the past".

Those who warned that there was a bubble forming and a crash coming were derided. There was enormous pressure to conform to the lend lend lend mentality.

psychotim said @ 4:48am GMT on 11th Mar
Actually, it's because our government maintained tight regulation when everyone else was clammoring to let banks do whatever they wanted.

Naruki said @ 3:40am GMT on 11th Mar
What are they, Singaporean police?

jaxtraw said @ 8:47pm GMT on 10th Mar
I just had a bath and thought of a more relevant reply. I was naked, and you are free to imagine me that way if that works for you.

MV=PQ

M is the quantity of money. It's not easy to measure, but it's some sum of cash, demand deposits, debt instruments etc. V can't be directly measured and is simply implied by the other terms in the equation.

Seems to me that the crash happened when M suddenly fell. Lots of stuff being treated as money like CDOs was suddenly realised to have little or no value, so the quantity of money suddenly fell. So I don't think it's V that has fallen, it's M.

The Keynesian policies thus attempt to compensate for a lower M with a higher V (other than money printing, the "last resort"). But it's M that's the problem, not V. I'm not sure that one can meaningfully change the value of V. Thinking about it, my general sense of disattisfaction with the quantity equation reared its ugly purple head again. I'm not sure V is a real variable, it's more a sly way of introducing time into the equation (money per unit time=production per unit time *price level). Indeed, Q is just a conversion factor between "production units" and "money units" when you look at it.

So really it's just dM=dP.

So anyway, not sure about that last bit, but I think it's not the velocity of money, it's the (notional) quantity of money that fell drastically.

jaxtraw said @ 8:53pm GMT on 10th Mar
Oops, mixed up my P's and Q's.

f00m@nB@r said @ 11:49pm GMT on 10th Mar
Why do you assume V and Q are constant? Is it because economists never had classes in multivariable calculus and partial differential equations?

Looking at the Wikipedia entry, there seem to be a lot of hypotheses behind that "equation". (Scare quotes are appropriate, here.)

jaxtraw said @ 12:42am GMT on 11th Mar
I didn't assume Q is a constant. When it varies we call it "inflation" and "deflation".

My suggestion that V is effectively a constant is because it is little more than a unit conversion factor that introduces time to the equation. V is the number of transactions a particular money unit undergoes in a particular time period. But whether money really circulates faster or slower seems to me to be questionable. Rather, what affects the economy is M, not V. But it's only a suggestion.

I agree that this whole thing would be better analysed with calculus rather than a simple linear equation. I hadn't thought about this much for a long time, but the more I look at it, personally, the less it looks like it is meaningful or useful.

FifthSpango said @ 12:49am GMT on 11th Mar
"Seems to me that the crash happened when M suddenly fell. Lots of stuff being treated as money like CDOs was suddenly realised to have little or no value, so the quantity of money suddenly fell. So I don't think it's V that has fallen, it's M."

Sorry, don't buy it. While it's true that a large chunk of the crises was precipitated on banks money positions being much less robust than they thought, the real nub of the credit crunch was the post lehman brothers implosion of the credit markets. This was the palpable fall off in money velocity, companies literally could not find financing as nobody knew who was going to blow up next.

That's also the reason that states have been able to finance impressive deficits, as companies that refuse to lend to each other will lend to the government.

Indeed, if what you are saying were true, then QE a would be rampantly inflationary, which the numbers show it is not.

Because there would be no fall off in velocity to compensate for the reflating of the monetary base.

Though I think you are right, that the ability to change V is massively overstated. I think we have to agree that it is a reality, and one that varies over time.

Also, I don't argue that money invested is somehow outside the system. But that money invested is going towards improving Aggregate Supply, where as money being spent in consumption is going towards aggregate demand. And given our large excess capacity as stands, I worry more about AD than AS.

FifthSpango said @ 12:50am GMT on 11th Mar

Oh poo.

Naruki said @ 3:41am GMT on 11th Mar
My script has a preview feature, you know.

jaxtraw said @ 1:13am GMT on 11th Mar
he real nub of the credit crunch was the post lehman brothers implosion of the credit markets. This was the palpable fall off in money velocity, companies literally could not find financing as nobody knew who was going to blow up next.

I'd say that's still the drop in M, not V. Lenders had no money to lend, effectively, because their supposed money was quite possibly worthless. A lack of M led to a lack of V, I'd say. That is, money that doesn't exist can't circulate.

Indeed, if what you are saying were true, then QE a would be rampantly inflationary, which the numbers show it is not.

Not yet, but we've had "surprise" inflation of 3.5%. Inflation is unpredictable; nobody knows where and when it will strike. And some will be soaked up by the property market, which everyone always wants to inflate anyway. Indeed, arguably that's precisely where most inflation occurs, but people pretend it isn't inflation because of this belief that property prices rise by magic.

If so, it's that inflation that gradually destabilises the rest of the market as money is drawn out of the non-inflating economy to service the inflating debt burden. That's just my speculation, mind.

Though I think you are right, that the ability to change V is massively overstated. I think we have to agree that it is a reality, and one that varies over time.

Thanks. I think my general vague point was that V is not very amenable to government intervention, hence disappointing results from QE and stimulus packages, etc.

And given our large excess capacity as stands, I worry more about AD than AS.

I worry that attempting to stop prices falling in some parts of the market ("deflation") is going to cause another bubble and crash. Especially if the money pushed into the economy ends up servicing debts on property.

FifthSpango said @ 1:40am GMT on 11th Mar
Ok. I need to get to sleep. But I can't quite leave this alone;

I'd say that's still the drop in M, not V. Lenders had no money to lend, effectively, because their supposed money was quite possibly worthless. A lack of M led to a lack of V, I'd say. That is, money that doesn't exist can't circulate.

I don't see this as agreeing with the facts on the ground. Private loaning has dropped off, but public sector borrowing has jumped in response. In brief; companies are not finding themselves without the money at all, they were (and are) unable to lend to other companies who may go bust, so they lend to the government instead, who in turn dispense it back into the economy. Without government playing this role, money velocity would have flat lined and a lot (more...) perfectly viable companies would have gone to the wall. This is all without any real effect on the broad money supply.

Not yet, but we've had "surprise" inflation of 3.5%. Inflation is unpredictable; nobody knows where and when it will strike. And some will be soaked up by the property market, which everyone always wants to inflate anyway. Indeed, arguably that's precisely where most inflation occurs, but people pretend it isn't inflation because of this belief that property prices rise by magic.

Quick point; House price inflation wasn't counted in inflation measures, as it was assumed that it would show up through mortgage rates and rental costs, and that factoring it in directly would "double count". In actuality, I think this has been proven... dubious... But I think it's also a bit much to suggest some form of conspiracy.

As to inflation; we both have to admit that any talk of inflation is more guesswork than fact, and that future predictions are even more just guesses. But with that caveat;

I reckons that current surprise inflation is largely oil price fueled, and that deflation is still the greater threat. I would be deeply surprised to see the BoE interest rate rise above 1% any time in the next 5 years.

But we shall have to leave posterity to judge our respective conjectures...

"I worry that attempting to stop prices falling in some parts of the market ("deflation") is going to cause another bubble and crash. Especially if the money pushed into the economy ends up servicing debts on property."

Again, one for posterity, but I highly doubt it.

Sure, we'll see another bubble and crash eventually, but I personally fear a Japanese style "lost generation" more immediately, as I don't think the government has taken sufficient action to prevent it. I would like to see QE run at about 3 times what it is, and the deficit doubled to pay for massive capital spending programs (bet you aren't with me...).

I disagree with you, because I don't think we'll see expectations recover to pre-crash levels for many many years, and being a good Keynesian I see bubbles as being all about the animal spirits.

In an age of decidedly anemic growth, the fear of another bubble strikes me as ... curious!

jaxtraw said @ 8:46am GMT on 11th Mar
Spango, this isn't so much a reply as a clarification. Do you agree or diasgree that "M" fell at the start of the crash, that is that the CDOs etc were a form of money, the quantity of which was discovered to be lower than expected? Or would you not count them in M?

Interested in what you think on that.

FifthSpango said @ 9:55am GMT on 11th Mar
I'm really not sure.

I can definitely see the argument that you make, that they are part of the money supply, and if the banks used them as collateral against which to expand lending, then yes you probably do have to count them as broad money, and see that as falling.

But, something is making me uncomfortable about that line of reasoning. Because, then, isn't any stock market fall a fall in M, as would any house price fall. I'm just not sure that asset prices should be included as part of the money base...

More reading needed.

jaxtraw said @ 4:04pm GMT on 11th Mar
I don't know whether they sholud be officially counted as money, but it does seem that a general fall in the value of some asset which is "money like" acts upon the economy like a fall in M.

Naruki said @ 3:40am GMT on 11th Mar
Uni Dating Club? Is that a euphemism for the Onanism Club?

FifthSpango said @ 9:45am GMT on 11th Mar
debating.

I don't need a club to fap.

Naruki said @ 12:22pm GMT on 12th Mar
If you don't have a club, wouldn't that be schlicking?

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:53pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
Economics is largly sociology.

We can't understand ants.

Hell, we start patting ourselves on the back when we get 3 furbies to talk.

Good luck with figuring out humans.

Naruki said @ 3:39am GMT on 11th Mar
Also, I think you may be masking your feelings of infatuation with hostility.

No, that's me. :-)

BTW, you said that backwards. English is not just for Americans to get right, you know.

sanepride said @ 6:49pm GMT on 10th Mar
Absolutely correct. You are nitpicking.

The economy runs on money spent on goods and services, not sitting idly in bank accounts.

jaxtraw said @ 6:52pm GMT on 10th Mar
The economy runs on production of goods and services, not spending. On the idleness of banked money, see my reply to FifthSpango.

sanepride said @ 7:10pm GMT on 10th Mar
OK here we go.

The production of goods and services is dependent on money being spent on them. If people aren't spending then production slows, jobs are lost, and people have less money to spend. A vicious cycle if you will. Ergo, money spent on goods and services is indeed the 'fuel' that runs the economy.

And as for that idle money that banks can use for lending and investing, see the roots of the current ongoing credit/financial crisis.

jaxtraw said @ 7:18pm GMT on 10th Mar
People produce in order to consume, "Say's Law".

A person can only trade if they have produced something to trade. Money is simply an intermediary. Economies "shrink" when people are producing less, not because they are spending less; that is, they only reduce their spending becuase their own production has fallen.

The Keynesian feedback is clearly false; if it were true, any temporary downward fluctuation (e.g. a reduction in say wheat production) would cause a collapse of the economy to zero. That doesn't happen. The economy is, in general, constantly trying to grow. If you kill part of it with a crisis it will temporarily fall back to a lower level, but just instantly start growing again. There is no vicious cycle. Attempts by government to prevent this imaginary threat are what causes booms and extended recessions (the classic example of the latter being the Great Depression, when the US government actively destroyed production to try to maintain high prices, on the "spending drives the economy" fallacy).

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:45pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
You maybe right, but you won't be vindicated within your lifetime.

sanepride said @ 9:55pm GMT on 10th Mar
Money is simply an intermediary.

A quaint notion in a global economy that places such emphasis on currency and valuation as a means of measuring economic strength and heath.

Anyway, production may be an important factor in economic growth or shrinkage, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Obviously it's dictated by demand - which ultimately originates with the consumer.

jaxtraw said @ 10:16pm GMT on 10th Mar
The point of Say's Law; which Keynes missed, is that you can only demand when you've produced. People produce in order to demand. Demand-side theory might seem obvious, but it's wrong. Nobody can be a "consumer" unless they are a "producer". There is a constant fundamental error created by dividing traders into arbitrary classes, of seeing "consumers" as basically passive. They have to be actively producing something, in order to consume, and that consumption is a reflection of their production, which is driven by the desire to consume.

f00m@nB@r said @ 11:32pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
"Law"? It sounds like a conjecture.

f00m@nB@r said @ 11:33pm GMT on 10th Mar
I.e. more of that "high falutin'" philosophy you love to deride.

f00m@nB@r said @ 11:38pm GMT on 10th Mar
Or, more accurately, a postulate. It's a claim unbacked by data.

It sounds good to you, therefore you accept it as "obvious" and "true". It's a just-so story.

jaxtraw said @ 12:37am GMT on 11th Mar
Say's Law is a well known economic law, idea, postulate, suggestion, whatever. I didn't invent it. Don't blame me.

sanepride said @ 12:45am GMT on 11th Mar
It dates from the 19th Century and fails to account for the importance of money as a commodity in itself. It is, as I implied above, quaint.

jaxtraw said @ 1:17am GMT on 11th Mar
Depends if you understand it or not. Keynes thought he'd defeated it by restating it falsely as "supply creates demand" which it doesn't say at all. But the statement that people produce in order to consume is quite clearly true. I work in order to buy things, and for that reason alone. If I don't have any desire for more money, I won't work.

Chance would be fine thing. *sigh*

f00m@nB@r said @ 11:39pm GMT on 10th Mar
Here's a counter-example: Paris Hilton. Or any infant.

quaint said @ 10:39pm GMT on 10th Mar
Don't blame me.

FifthSpango said @ 12:57am GMT on 11th Mar
"Economies "shrink" when people are producing less"

Empirically not true. Production fell off after money velocity problems in the current crises. Companies didn't just decide to stop producing stuff.

The Keynesian feedback is clearly false; if it were true, any temporary downward fluctuation (e.g. a reduction in say wheat production) would cause a collapse of the economy to zero.

Eh? The multiplier is a diminishing effect, because marginal propensity to consume (simplifying away exports and taxes) is a fraction by definition. And there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Keynesian multiplier effects do occur.

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:41pm GMT on 10th Mar
Banks make money, ideally, by investing in business via loans etc.
Often these go into developing the service sector.
(business loans, start up capital for investment, etc)
Service sector helps sell consumables etc.
This feeds the demand for manufactured goods.
Manufactured goods make money.

You are right.

And Obama is pissed because the banks are *not* giving out enough loan money- but, if I recall, are paying off their debt etc.

FifthSpango said @ 7:04pm GMT on 10th Mar
You say that. But in a subject as complex as economics it's worth getting the conceptual vocabulary right, lest we start thinking messily.

Misanthrope said @ 8:15pm GMT on 10th Mar
Since they are presumably using money to pay for the wedding, they are hardly creating value.

the belt said @ 8:21pm GMT on 10th Mar [Score:1 Interesting]
Wait... what? The gay people I know are affluent and educated in a pretty proportional way to the straight people I know. Obviously my social circle is a pretty limited sample, but do you have anything to back that up other than assumptions?

That being said, I have no qualms with your assertion that they have the right to inject their hot, throbbing, sweaty sums of money into our quivering, yearning, desperate economy by any means necessary - including lavish matrimonial ceremonies.

a few quick links:
"the end of gay affluence"
"Stereotype persists of gay affluence"
wealthy gays making Provincetown more like a rich gay Nantucket, boxing out non-rich gays and killing P-Town's free spirit [my sumarization]

sanepride said @ 9:46pm GMT on 10th Mar
Interesting. I wasn't aware of these debunking studies, thanks for the info. Anecdotally, the gay people I know fit the stereotype pretty well, not 'super rich', but certainly stable and comfortable with a bit of disposable income.

But yes, the larger issue is that it doesn't hurt for them to spend whatever disposable income they have on lavish weddings.

the belt said @ 2:23am GMT on 11th Mar
Honestly, I didn't really have much outside of anecdotal observations aside of my gay friends - some are waiters and school teachers, others are physicians and attorneys - just like my straight friends. Those articles are anything but complete, and are more opinion than fact, but at least they're a starting point.

That third article is important to me because I've spent a lot of time in Provincetown, and it has gone through waves of flamboyance but never (to my knowledge) such a cultural shift based on successful gays flexing their dollars.

When gay marriage was put up to voters here in Maine last year, I seriously considered getting a notary license so I could get me a slice of that sweet wedding pie. Unfortunately my fellow Mainers denied gays the right to marry.

Naruki said @ 3:36am GMT on 11th Mar
How many of your friends have children? I think the financial (and other) drain of kids is the biggest factor.

the belt said @ 11:40am GMT on 11th Mar
I have maybe a dozen friends, all straight couples, with children under 4 or who are pregnant. Some are well off, others not so much. I don't have kids, so correct me if I'm wrong, but gay or straight, you don't need to be a millionaire to raise children.

You do, however, need roughly $10K per year per child over their first 18 years (according to the USDA). So roughly a $500 drain on each partner every month in a 2-parent household.

That's a decent amount of cash, but not astronomical. Just for a quick comparison, he average monthly car payment in the US is $479, according to Edmonds.com (via msn money).

By no means am I an expert on any of this, I wouldn't have read any of those articles above if my personal experience agreed with the stereotype. I think it's easy to notice the gay man in the designer suit drinking expensive booze at the bar while ignoring the postal carrier, plumber, park ranger, or librarian whose sexual orientation isn't obvious, and whose financial status will never be called "affluent."

EPT said @ 12:16pm GMT on 11th Mar
My mother has been gay for almost all my life (obviously not all). I've been witness to my share of dyke dinner parties. Gay (and bi) people do the same thing straight people do. There is no difference, apart from what you do with your nethers (well, and intimacy in general). And if anyone thinks that there is a difference, or that gay equals anything else, they've bought the media lie. Yes, there are scene gays, but they're just the prominent visible ones. But just like most straights don't shout their sexuality from the rooftops, neither do most gays. Your last paragraph speaks sooth.

Asscheeks Akimbo said @ 5:59pm GMT on 10th Mar
Yeah, I'll bet it's his "personal stimulus package."

mrcucumber said @ 3:51am GMT on 11th Mar

don't know if that's accurate....

sanepride said @ 4:31am GMT on 11th Mar
Marriage between first cousins doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Now brother and sister..

EPT said @ 12:18pm GMT on 11th Mar
Those wacky New Englanders!