One of the things I really loathe about the place our society has sunk to is that people -often so-called “experts”, politicians and commentators- say stupid things and nobody challenges them.

On Wednesday the stupidest comment that I heard, and there were many in the category, was that legalising gay “marriage” will boost the economy by $1 billion per year. They quoted unnamed “economists” but I would say most of them would be Year 11 students.

Even if you take the quote at face value, and there was no evidence that this number was anything other than plucked out of the air on the spur of the moment, a billion dollars is nothing in our economy. Last year the Australian GDP was about a trillion dollars, so even a billion dollars increase is next to nothing, a rounding error (0.1% of the total). Compare this to coal which last year we exported over $56 billion.

But here is the stupid part of the figure. Most, if not all of the $1 billion that will now be spent (and we have no information about how accurate that figure is), would have been spent anyway. It is not money that suddenly appeared from nowhere. Yes, people in the wedding industry will get a boost, but that will be at the expense of other sectors of the economy. We all know that if you have to spend money on one thing you can’t spend it on another thing.

The annoying thing is that nobody ever questions these figures, whether handed out by politicians or unnamed sources. Don’t believe anything you hear in the media, especially when somebody is boosting their pet cause.