It may be the president’s goofiest idea yet.
His Monday brainstorm was for the federal government to get into the movie business. In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump floated the notion of creating a “Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America.” So this isn’t exactly a socialist proposal — where the government would seize the means of production and go about making movies — it’s a subsidy proposal: tax breaks; to “benefit ALL
Trump posts as if he has worked the math out, where the booty the government loses in direct taxation “will be made up tenfold by the money pouring into the Treasury’s coffers.”
A familiar rationale. But does it work? Do tax credits incentivize producers so much that taxes downstream of the productions make up for all the bother and paperwork?
Well, no need for theory. States already have such programs.
Tosin Akintola, in his Reason article — “State Film Subsidies Lose Money. Trump Wants To Try the Idea Nationally.” — found that “the film and TV industry in eight states returned between 3 cents and 31 cents for every dollar.”
Entertainment projects do not create that many jobs.
We used to talk about the states as “laboratories of democracy,” by which we meant “laboratories for policy.”
The point isn’t to take the failed experiments and run them at the federal level, hoping for something different.
Sure, Hollywood is lame. But don’t make Washington the new entertainment capital of the world. It’s doing bad enough as the capital of more serious business.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “The New Hollywood?”
Perversely, each of our major political parties often seems to discover what is wrong with a policy when that policy is embraced by the other major party, but discover only to the extent that it is embraced by that other party. So the Democrats might — just might — reject a Federal movie subsidy, and might even present reasonable or semi-reasonable arguments against it, simply because Trump has made this wretched proposal.
For my part, I want to note that government subsidies for movie-making simply cannot be reconciled with liberty of expression, properly understood. That liberty is exactly and only of not having one’s use of own resources constrained or compelled in response to the expressive content. Compelling taxpayers to fund acts of expression with which they disagree is a violation of the rights of these taxpayers.
G_d knows that reasonable people object to much of what movie-makers have been expressing; but unreasonable people too should not have their resources taken for expression to which they object.
Hollywood is in trouble primarily because it makes movies that are of no interest to the public.
How does the president plan to force Hollywood to make movies people would be willing to pay to see?