Can’t blame Obuma for this one. I agree with O (only this time). Let’s get rid of this tax break.
While not a big fan of using this type of public tax engineering in the first place, the analysis is flawed in that it assumes that the alternative case would be for Disney to make the film in Michigan under the existing tax rates. Simply put, if they didn’t get the tax incentives they would have made the film elsewhere and Michigan would have seen no tax revenue at all. The idea that it “cost” the state $X is false.
The answer lies in reducing tax rates on all businesses to a level where it makes sense to locate your business in a particular state.
There are subsidies, and then there is tax abatement.
If you work at a good paying job and pay taxes, and your neighbor runs a small business, makes what you make, yet gets tax abatement because he employs several people, is it fair to you?
Remember that he not only pays his own taxes, but his employees pay taxes as well. So all told, his actions produce far more taxes than you pay.
However, if government pays him taxpayer money as a subsidy, it is a different kettle of fish, because even though it means he can hire more people who will then pay taxes, government is taking that subsidy out of *your* hide, to benefit government.
So when i walk into the theater to watch it can’t I just tell the cashier to put the cost of the ticket on Uncle Sam’s Tab????
Since i paid for the ticwet anyways....????
That hard earned taxpayer money could be used to build something useful - like a new sports stadium!
Oz: The Great and Powerful - Ah more extreme originality coming from Hollywood. Multi-million dollar budgets and they can’t buy a dollar notebook to write something new. Now last week I heard they have a new TV show called “Bates motel”. Wow! Awesome originality! Where did they ever get that idea? Just a bunch of cocaine addled leftist schmucks who can’t be bothered to get off their arses to read new scripts.
The stories of “taxpayer subsidies” regarding movie making are generally deceptive.
These are cases where a movie is looking for a place to film, and they don’t want to pay the high taxes that the state charges for businesses, and the state decides that a little money and publicity is better than none, so they waive the taxes.
If they didn’t, and the movie filmed somewhere else, they would still get no taxes, so they aren’t actually paying out money, or losing money.
Now, sometimes they will actually waive taxes from other businesses working with the movies that would otherwise be collected, or they might offer free police help which costs money. But generally, a state which allows a movie to come in “tax-free” comes out ahead on taxes because of things like sales and food taxes paid by all the people who are there to do the film.
In some ways, conservatives could use this to argue that even liberals know that taxes are bad for their economy, because they are so willing to waive them when it’s their favored businesses that are being hurt by the excessive taxes.
It is amazing that a movie might have to allocate 20% of their budget to paying various taxes a state would impose to “allow” them to come film, so it doesn’t bother me when a state reduces that cost.
This type of accounting is the same one liberals use when they say a tax cut costs money, that a tax cut counts as spending, and that people keeping more of their money is a gift from the government.
It pays to be a limo socialist CEO. That is why we have so many fascists rising to the top and sucking the life out of the US Treasury and economy.
The communists see the fascists as their central competition, once they have killed the constitutional Republic. For normal Americans - small businesses and workers - both are centralized power poison.