Hollywood Hypocrites

Jason Mattera

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781451625639
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Institutions & Public Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A humorous critique of the Hollywood liberals from the New York Times bestselling author of Obama Zombies.

THE BOOK YOU’RE ABOUT TO READ WILL PISS YOU OFF.

Are you sick of self-important celebrities preaching against “global warming” yet flying private planes to their countless homes? Fed up with lectures about charity and philanthropy from miserly rockers who will do anything for a tax break? Disgusted by leftist stars decrying the evils of the Second Amendment as their personal bodyguards pack more heat than a Chuck Norris kick to the face?

You laughed as you watched gonzo journalist Jason Mattera “punk” some of the Left’s biggest icons. You cheered as he rattled a generation from their unthinking liberal slumber in Obama Zombies. Now, in his shocking latest New York Times bestseller, Mattera sets his sights on his biggest target yet, ground zero for liberal lunacy, the Left’s Holy Land: .Hollywood.

1 Hollywood Welfare

How Hollywood Idiots like Michael Moore Swipe $1,500,000,000 of Your Tax Dollars Each Year and Then Whine That You Should Pay Higher Taxes

Hey, you know what? Studio executives? They would shoot a movie on Mars if they could get a 25 percent tax break.

—Director Michael Corrente¹

No one watches the snoozefest Oscar awards anymore. But for a second let’s pretend they did. As the camera scans the audience of Hollywood moguls, directors, producers, and movie stars, isn’t your heart struck by the extreme poverty on display? I mean, just look at them all, sitting there being forced to wear last season’s Gucci and Prada collections, instead of owning the latest and greatest runway fashions. The inhumanity! How can we, the American taxpayers, sit idly by as Michael Moore is starving to death, withering away? And look at poor Alec Baldwin and Robert Redford. How can we, the most powerful nation on earth, look on with callous hearts as these two honorable men are forced to endure ever worse plastic surgery? After all, if Redford’s facial skin gets pulled any tighter, the man will morph into a drum.

That’s why something must be done. We, the American taxpayers, must take immediate and decisive action. And thankfully, in 2010 alone, hardworking Americans like you did just that. You spent less time with your family so you could work longer hours at your job so that $1,500,000,000 of your tax dollars could be confiscated from your paycheck and added to Rob Reiner’s.

Indeed, the next time you see Obama’s Hollywood foot soldiers, two words should instantly pop into your mind: welfare recipients.

Since 1992, Hollywood has been involved in a heist that would make even Bonnie and Clyde jealous. Few Americans know about it. But so-called movie state tax credit programs, which exist in forty-three states, have become one of the silent budget killers in many states throughout the country. In an effort to attract their Hollywood pals to shoot in their states, Democrat lawmakers began offering tax subsidies. In places like Michael Moore’s Michigan, the tax credit is as high as 42 percent. The argument was that by subsidizing film productions, states could experience massive job creation for their citizens, spur economic spending for their businesses, and turn themselves into filmmaking Meccas. Furthermore, by featuring a state’s scenery in a movie, proponents claim, you will want to travel and visit the state, thus bringing forth a tidal wave of tourism dollars.

Brilliant!

Take a movie like, oh, I don’t know . . . Texas Chainsaw Massacre. See, right there you’ve got a piece of tourism gold, baby! Dismembered limbs, decapitated heads, and a homicidal maniac wielding a chainsaw all set against the bucolic Texas scenery?

“Honey, pack the bags, load up the kids, and board the dog. Lone Star State, here we come! I loves me some Texas Chainsaw tourism!”

Idiots.

Indeed, like most progressive policy prescriptions, the whole Hollywood welfare thing has been an unmitigated debacle. Worse, for a party that vehemently opposes tax cuts for the wealthy and demands higher taxes for everyone, Hollywood’s welfare heist is yet one of many examples of the Left’s breathtaking hypocrisy.

In fiscal year 2010, the forty-three states that offer film subsidies spent $1.5 billion of your tax dollars subsidizing film and TV production.² Let’s put that in real terms. Hollywood’s 2009 welfare payments would have been enough to pay the salaries of 23,500 middle school teachers, 26,600 firefighters, and 22,800 police patrol officers.³

But here’s where it gets good. Are you ready for this? If a producer doesn’t have a big enough tax liability to use up all of a refundable film tax credit, that state cuts him a big fat check anyway. That’s right. Direct cash payment to a Hollywood welfare recipient. I mean, come on, people . . . how is James Cameron supposed to scrape by on a measly $210 million?! Seriously. He needs your money to survive, you stingy conservative mongrel!

But we’re not done. It gets better. There’s also something called a “transferable tax credit.” These little doozeys are cash cows for producers and cow pies for taxpayers. Movie producers who are given transferable tax credits to come shoot their movie in that state can then sell their tax credits to companies that owe state taxes, no matter what kind of business it is. Generally, the businesses that snatch up these movie tax credits are one of liberals’ favorite corporate bogeymen—insurance companies. In Connecticut, for example, big bank bailout winners Bank of America and Wachovia gobbled up a combined $7 million in film tax credits. And in Massachusetts, half of all transferrable credits were bought up by insurance companies.⁴ What this means is that taxpayers get to spend more hours at work to ensure that Hollywood fat cats can cash in by selling credits to Obama’s bailout buddies and the insurance companies.

As Sharon Carty, writing for USA Today, put it, the movie industry is a “gypsy-like” business that “roams from place to place to find the best locations—and the best deals.”⁵ Robert Tannenwald, writing for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, agrees. He notes that state film subsidy programs are a “wasteful, ineffective, and unfair instrument of economic development.” He says that what lawmakers sell as a “quick fix” to boost jobs and bolster businesses within a state generally goes bust. The reason? “In reality they benefit mostly non-residents, especially well-paid non-resident film and TV professionals . . . The benefits to the few are highly visible; the costs to the majority are hidden because they are spread so widely and detached from the subsidies.”⁶ But perhaps those states should remain grateful, because, as the Tax Foundation reports, “In many states, today, movie producers actually pay a negative tax.”

Well, hell . . . no wonder Hollywood progressives think the rich should pay more in taxes! It’s because they don’t pay a single penny of the taxes they owe!

Now let’s be clear. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with businesses trying to bring down their tax burden. But that’s not what’s at issue here. As the Wall Street Journal explains:

This is the same Hollywood film industry whose members fund causes and candidates that favor raising taxes on everyone else. The Motion Picture Production and Distribution industry last year gave $14 million in political contributions: 89 percent went to pro-tax Democrats. A few years ago, director Rob Reiner funded a successful California initiative to raise the state income tax rate to more than 10 percent. Unlike a film shoot, which can relocate on a moment’s notice, your average small businessman in Encino is stuck paying the highest tax rate in the country—at least until he gives up and moves to Reno. . . . As a general principle, however, states shouldn’t chase smoke stacks or film production crews with specific tax breaks. It makes much more sense for cities, states, and the federal government to lower tax rates for everyone.⁷

The liberal lunacy of it all is compounded when you stop and consider the fundamental truth that progressives chronically deny but their own economic behavior proves: tax cuts incentivize business decisions. Everywhere and always the Leftist cacophony remains: “Stick it to big business! U.S. corporate tax rates should be high! Companies won’t up and leave the country if we raise taxes on business, so jack ’em up!” In one regard, they are right: it’s way harder for a brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop pizza shop to pick up and leave than it is for a motion picture filming crew. But that just goes to show how cynical and outrageous the Hollywood welfare boondoggle truly is. As the film tax incentive programs demonstrate, producers and directors can and do change their entire filming location based on a “lowest bidder” style of tax negotiations. The Hollywood Left wants lower tax rates for them and higher tax rates for the rest of us, including small business owners who don’t have the lavish lifestyle and luxury of being able to hop in their private carbon-spewing jet and zip over to another state to do business to swipe handfuls of taxpayer cash. Must be nice.

But the sheer hypocrisy of it all is breathtaking. Take, for example, the case of Michael Moore. At the July 2008 Traverse City Film Festival event, director Moore participated in a panel discussion wherein he decried Hollywood welfare in the form of so-called state tax credit programs. “These are large multinational corporations—Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch—that own these studios,” said Moore. “Why do they need our money from Michigan, from our taxpayers? We’re already broke here. Why? I mean, they play one state against another and so they get all this free cash when they’re making billions already in profits. What’s the thinking behind that? . . . Giving free money to a bunch of billionaires.”⁸

Flash forward to 2010.

Following the release of Moore’s pro-socialism, anti-capitalism “documentary” film, Capitalism: A Love Story, a film that has grossed $17,436,509 in worldwide sales, Michael “I Hate America” Moore asked his cash-strapped home state of Michigan to fork over $1 million from the State of Michigan Film Office so he could get himself some of that taxpayer “free cash” he decried all those corporatist pigs getting just two years earlier.⁹ The request was approved.

“The hypocrisy of Michael Moore is absolutely stunning,” says Michigan state senator Nancy Cassis. “One day he criticized the film giveaways and then asked for a $1 million handout of his own. We are supposed to be spurring economic growth, but we’re giving taxpayer money to a film that trashes our economic system. How responsible is this?”¹⁰

Not very.

Michigan has a $1.6 billion budget shortfall and some of the highest unemployment in America, thanks to the Obama economy. But is that enough to stop Hollywood’s leading binge eater? Pshhh.

“Our small businesses in this state, that create 70 percent of all the jobs, have been hardest hit by the new Michigan business tax—and the surcharge of 22 percent on that tax—which is going to subsidize these giveaways and these handouts,” said Senator Cassis. “Meanwhile, these small business employers are letting go of employees. . . . We simply can’t afford this handout to one industry—Hollywood producers—over all others. Really, we’re robbing Peter—the hardworking Michigan businessman—to pay Paul—the Hollywood tycoon.”¹¹

Michael LaFaive, fiscal policy director at the Mackinac Center, weighed in on Moore’s brazen hypocrisy: “While we don’t blame Mr. Moore and his production team for taking what is offered, it’s striking that a movie focused on the inequities of granting taxpayer dollars to private enterprise would apply for and receive taxpayer-funded incentives.”¹²

But given the state of Michigan’s insane decision to up their Hollywood welfare rate to the highest level in the land, perhaps it’s not as surprising after all. In 2007, spending on film productions in Michigan was $2 million. Yet after it decided to extend the jaw-dropping 42 percent Hollywood welfare rate, the state attracted more than one hundred movie and TV productions and exploded spending on movies to $224 million. Sounds great for the Michigan economy, right? Wrong. In September 2010, the Michigan Senate’s Fiscal Agency reported that, even under the rosiest economic assumptions, tax receipts generated by new economic activity barely recoup 10 percent of the cost to taxpayers. As Manhattan Institute fellow Josh Barro writes, the report “estimates that the $125 million Michigan will spend on film credits in FY10–11 will generate just $13.5 million in new tax receipts, for a net fiscal cost of $111.5 million.” And as for private sector activity? “The report finds the credits will generate just $78.5 million . . . well below their fiscal cost.”¹³ How could they? As the report concludes, 47 percent of the qualified expenditures were found to not even affect the Michigan economy.

It’s even worse than that, though. As Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals, not only has Michigan’s film subsidies program failed to produce the jobs boom supporters promised, but the state has actually lost, not gained, film and entertainment jobs. Since Michigan’s Hollywood welfare program’s inception, the number of Michigan film jobs has gone from 5,867 jobs to 5,290, a 9.8 percent drop.¹⁴

Michigan isn’t the only state where taxpayers are taking it on the chin to fund Hollywood’s welfare handouts. Indeed, a quick tour around the country reveals just how corrupt and hypocritical Obama’s biggest supporters truly are.

Take Massachusetts, for example. For every film tax credit dollar that John “What Yacht Taxes?” Kerry pays in the few Massachusetts taxes he fails to dodge each year, the commonwealth gains a measly $0.16 in revenue, mostly in the form of income tax revenues withheld from film company employees. That means the remaining $0.84 has to come from budget cuts or from charging Barney Frank’s prostitution ring roommates higher taxes on their—ahem—income (that’s not a low blow, unfortunately . . . you could Google it).¹⁵

But it gets even more outrageous. Check out this little gem buried in the middle of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue report:

We estimate that of the $395.4 million in total payroll expenses of feature films produced in Massachusetts since 2006, $62.9 million or 15.9 percent was paid to Massachusetts residents. Of the estimated $332.5 million paid to non-residents, $177.3 million was accounted for by wages and salaries of 36 individual actors, directors and producers who were paid more than $1 million per production.¹⁶

Excuse me? Come again? The salaries of thirty-six Hollywood wing nuts—morons who don’t even live in Massachusetts—account for $177.3 million of the total payroll expenses?! And these overpaid, Obam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Description
• Author Bio
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Hollywood Welfare
• Chapter 2: Private Jets Against Global Warming
• Chapter 3: Working-Class Zeroes
• Chapter 4: The Priestess of Pigs (Capitalist, That Is)
• Chapter 5: Hollywood Hatemongers
• Chapter 6: Hollywood Leftist Loon Lifetime Achievement Award
• Chapter 7: Money-Grubbing Anti-Materialists
• Chapter 8: Be Healthy or Else!
• Chapter 9: Be Peaceful or I’ll Shoot Yo Ass!
• Conclusion
• Notes