00:00 Speaker A
So, let’s talk about the actual economic impact. Let’s just say that 1% of LGBTQ Americans decided to leave. And this is kind of what uh economists might say is an entry-level economic drain or impact. If 1% of LGBTQ adults in the United States, or roughly 200,000 individuals, decided to leave the country, the immediate spending loss would be based on that $1.4 trillion, roughly 14 billion a year.
00:46 John
A year.
00:46 Speaker A
A year. We are talking about those kinds of numbers when it comes to tariffs and uh other economic impacts that are going on in the country right now due to policy. It also would mean that based on taxes and GDP, that that loss would balloon to somewhere around 40 to 50 billion a year.
01:17 Speaker A
equivalent to the GDP of some of the smaller states in the country.
01:21 John
Yeah, so if you put that into perspective, that’s like pretty much saying, we’ll just let go of, you know, Alabama or Louisiana or Kentucky or Idaho Dakota. Yeah, I mean, and and that has a significant impact on the on the national economy.
01:42 Speaker A
Right. Yeah, the and one of the other things to think about, um, when we’re looking at, we’re looking at these scenarios, as John and I mentioned, some individuals are looking about doing this through investment, pulling out hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of or even billions of dollars out of the US stock market because they want to invest in another country like Portugal, Greece, Brazil. Some of these countries are opening their arms and saying, please, come invest in our stock market. It’s do and actually in some cases doing better than your stock market. And so these individuals are like, well, why why wouldn’t I do this? I have an exit plan and I can take my uh my investments abroad with me and earn even more.
02:45 John
Yeah, and I will say that we have this is more anecdotal than uh we have anything to to actually specific to report, but we have heard more and more people saying that they do want to diversify away from their US investments because things do seem a little bit more volatile here. And even though the market is performing great, there is the concern that it’s sort of overweighted in technology and that we’re sort of in this AI bubble and while that could be have a long-term benefit, things could be kind of helter skelter over until we actually um figure what figure out what that looks like.
03:13 Speaker A
Right.
03:13 John
And that for a lot of people who are in retirement age or nearing retirement age, that’s the kind of volatility that they don’t necessarily want to weather.