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Interesting but highly speculative on the part of the CBO. (The actual report: CBO | The Potential Budgetary Impact of Recognizing Same-Sex Marriages ) I do not anticipate that the marriage penalty will last long when it returns next year which is where a lot of the revenue seems to have been assumed to come from. I am equally skeptical that the other revenue numbers will materialize anytime soon as the report assumes that SSM marriage will include SS adoption of kids who receive medicaid etc and they will leave their estates to the kids instead of to charity and therefore create estate tax revenue. People who may be okay with SSM may not be so okay with two gay men adopting boys. That is going to be a tougher row to hoe IMHO.
They already adopt, whether people are okay with it or not. Only 1 state won't allow any sort of adoption for homosexuals, and that will change if same sex marriage is made completely legal across the US by the SCOTUS or even just fully equivalent to opposite sex marriage in that state.
And I believe way too many people have the wrong impression about SS to begin with. Only about 4% of spouses now actually receive spousal SS. I honestly believe that will go down further now that more and more dual working spouses come to retirement age because spousal SS only applies if the spouse didn't work at all or is only earned <1/2 of their spouse's SS entitlement. Chances are good that most same sex couples both worked.
Also, this didn't take into account, I'm pretty sure, all of the court battles that are being fought and will be fought over this issue up til the point where same sex marriage is completely legal throughout the US. This isn't just going to drop even if the SCOTUS rules that the laws are good, and it is likely we will get a much less solid ruling if it doesn't just strike down the laws altogether. You will have battles over whether couples who became same sex couples after they were married are entitled to still be recognized by the federal government. There are the battles over recognition issues in individual states. There are court battles over custody of children of same sex couples now that take much more time and effort due to them not having legal marriage recognition and in many cases adoption options. Most of these would go away or at least be greatly reduced when same sex marriage is legal.
Of course the marriage penalty is low now considering what it has been in the past. But it will likely always exist only because the government does offer two options for married couples to file taxes, and it will always have people who pick the one they believe will be best for them or that they have always picked without knowing the other one would be better as long as both options are available, at least to a point.
Personally I think they figured a low amount because it didn't take into consideration all the advantages that the government sees when people marry. But even if this estimate was high, there is no way it is so high that it would cost the government a lot of money to allow same sex couples to marry. There just aren't that many same sex couples out there to do this.