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.
Chart of the Day: Why US Fertility Rates Are Falling
U.S. fertility rates have fallen to record lows for two straight years. “Because the fertility rate subtly shapes many major issues of the day — including immigration, education, housing, the labor supply, the social safety net and support for working families — there’s a lot of concern about why today’s young adults aren’t having as many children,” Claire Cain Miller explains at The New York Times’ Upshot. “So we asked them.”
Here are some results of the Times’ survey, conducted with Morning Consult. Read the full Times story for more details.
A Record Low 47% of US Adults Say They're 'Extremely Proud' to Be American
Gallup says that, for the first time in the 18 years it’s been asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than half say they are "extremely proud." Just 47 percent now say they’re extremely proud, down from 70 percent in 2003.
Another 25 percent say they’re “very proud” — but the combined 72 percent who say they’re extremely or very proud is also the lowest Gallup has recorded. Pride levels among liberals and Democrats have plunged since 2017. Overall, 74 percent of Republicans and just 32 percent of Democrats call themselves “extremely proud” to be American.
Pfizer Has Raised Prices on 100 of Its Products
Weeks after President Trump said that drugmakers were about to implement “voluntary massive drops in prices” — reductions that have yet to materialize — Pfizer has raised prices on 100 of its products, The Financial Times’s David Crow reports:
“The increases were effective as of July 1 and in most cases were more than 9 per cent — well above the rate of inflation in the US, which is running at about 2 per cent. … Pfizer, the largest standalone drugmaker in the US, did decrease the prices of five products by between 16 per cent and 44 per cent, according to the figures.”
Crow notes that Pfizer also raised prices on many of its medicines in January, meaning that some prices have been hiked by nearly 20 percent this year. The drugmaker said that it was only changing prices on 10 percent of its medicines and that list prices did not reflect what most patients or insurers actually paid. The net price increase after rebates and discounts was expected to be in the “low single digits,” the company told the FT.
Chart of the Day: Pass-Through Tax Deductions Made Easy
The Republican tax overhaul was supposed to simplify the tax code, but most experts say it fell well short of the goal. Martin Sullivan, chief economist at Tax Analysts, tweeted out a chart of the analysis required to determine whether income qualifies for the passthrough tax deduction of 20 percent, and as you’ll see, it’s anything but simple.
A Conservative Bashes GOP Dysfunction on Spending Cuts
Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, offers a blistering critique of congressional Republican’s problems cutting spending:
Since the Republicans took the House in 2011, nearly every annual budget blueprint has promised to balance the budget within a decade with anywhere from $5 trillion to $8 trillion in spending cuts. And yet, you may have noticed, the budget has not moved towards balance. This is because the budget merely sets a broad fiscal goal. To actually cut spending, Congress must follow up with specific legislation to reform Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other targeted programs. In reality, most lawmakers who pass these budgets have no intention whatsoever of cutting this spending. As soon as the budget is passed, the targets are forgotten. The spending-cut legislation is never even drafted, much less voted on.
The annual budget exercise is thus a cynical exercise in symbolism. Congress calculates how much spending must be cut over ten years to balance the budget. Then they pass legislation setting a goal of cutting that amount. Then they move on to other business. It’s like a baseball team announcing that they voted to win the next World Series, and then not showing up to play the season.
Read the full piece at National Review.