Just in time for Gay Pride month, the comptroller of the city of New York, William Thompson Jr., has issued a report asserting that legalizing same-sex marriage in New York would be an opportunity for the city and the state to milk the gay couples and their wedding guests for more revenues. “Sales tax on wedding expenditures would add $4.3 million to the City’s budget and another $5.5 million to the State,” the report predicts. “The MTA, which receives a portion of the sales tax, would benefit by about $500,000. The city would collect an additional $767,000 in Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue.” These revenue estimates assume New York would become a magnet for out-of-state gay couples hoping to get married here, predicting 7,004 New York gay weddings over three years for Floridians, 6,046 New York gay weddings for Californians, 2,508 for Virginians, and so forth.

The newly married gay couples would get stuck at the state level with a “marriage penalty,” which, the comptroller’s report explains, “refers to the additional combined tax liability for married couples, compared to the liability that would be owed if they were each filing as single.” What’s more, New York state has a “rate recapture” provision, meaning that say, for couples who earn more than $150,000, all income, including that below $150,000, is taxed at the higher rate. What that means is that gay people earning $80,000 each would, if they got married, be taxed on their joint income at the higher rate, which the comptroller estimates would mean a $2.1 million increase in state income tax collections.

The comptroller sees a chance to rake in $3 million in revenues from marriage license fees, at $35 each in New York City and $40 each elsewhere in the state. Real-estate-transfer-tax revenues could soar as the home-ownership rates of same-sex couples rise to the higher-levels of heterosexual couples, the report says. And the comptroller predicts tens of millions of dollars in cost “savings” in Medicaid and assistance to the blind and disabled, as the burden of providing for these persons would be shifted from the state to able-bodied or higher-income spouses.

What needs to be said about all of this is that it discloses an awful lot, not about the merits of gay marriage, which is something about which reasonable persons can differ, but about the way in which a certain kind of Democratic politician in this town views individuals no matter their sexual orientation. They exist, it seems, less as persons with rights than as wallets to be raided. There are all sorts of reasons to be for or against gay marriage, but the idea that it would have an effect on the state budget one way or another amounting to a fraction of a rounding error is low on our list. If gay marriage is going to mean more money for the politicians in Albany and City Hall to dispense to campaign-contributor cronies and other special interest groups, it might actually be a reason to oppose it.

The Thompson report appears to be issued with the intent of advancing the case for gay marriage. It was released accompanied by a press release full of laudatory quotes from the various gay advocacy groups, and we suppose if equality is the goal, the chance to join the rest of the state’s residents in groaning under the full weight of the highest state and local tax burden in the country might look like an opportunity. But surely there’s a chance the whole effort could backfire. It strikes us that the gay advocacy groups could well think it over some more and decide to focus their efforts not on New York but on a lower-tax jurisdiction that already has a libertarian streak and a well-developed wedding industry, Las Vegas. After all, marriage has plenty of virtues, but being looked at as a tax target isn’t one of them.