They’re Leaving Las Vegas: Fewer I Do’s in Last Decade
When it comes to destination weddings, Las Vegas has lost that loving feeling. The Las Vegas Sun reports that the wedding rate in Sin City has plummeted 37 percent in the past decade—nearly 47,000 fewer couples got married in 2014 than in 2004.
By comparison, 2004 was a boom year for weddings in Sin City. There were 128,000 weddings that year—including Britney Spears’ 55-hour marriage to Jason Allen Alexander at A Little White Wedding Chapel.
Related: Marriage?? Young Americans Aren’t Even Shacking Up
Who knows why gambling on love in Sin City has become a losing bet? Perhaps the dip reflects a national trend of millennials waiting to tie the knot or choosing to stay single. The marriage rate in the U.S. neared a record low in 2015 and is expected to drop further in 2016. Then there’s the expense. According to the TheKnot, the average wedding cost (excluding the honeymoon) is $31,213, with many couples looking for more unusual venues.
Clark County Clerk Lynn Goya, who took office in January, wants to change that trend in Vegas. The current fee for a marriage license in Las Vegas is $60, but Goya is asking for a $14 increase in the cost of wedding licenses to support marketing efforts targeting engaged couples. Last year 81,000 weddings happened in Las Vegas—and she’s hoping that wedding vow renewals and gay weddings will help boost those numbers even more. In New York, the legalization of gay marriage in 2011 led to an estimated $259 million in spending and $16 million in revenues for New York City.
Related: The $2.6 Billion Gay Wedding Boom
Then again it may be hard for Las Vegas to shake that quickie, drive-thru wedding image. Sin City has always had an illustrious history of celebrity weddings, with many more misses than hits: Cher’s nine-day union to rocker Gregg Allman in 1975, Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra in 1966, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis in 1987, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford in 1991, and Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton in 2000. On the bright side, there’s Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s marriage, which endured for 50 years, Jon Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea’s 1987 wedding day, and Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelo’s union from 1996, which is still standing.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
