Find real cost of movie tax breaks

3/3/08
Everyone loves seeing a movie star. Celebrity sightings are exciting. Watching your hometown in a big-budget movie? Good times all around.
But none of this is happening by accident. The state Legislature in the past few years has made life awfully easy for movie studios looking for a place to do business, with huge tax credits offered in exchange for House Speaker James A. Amann to call the state “Hollywood East.”
Whether this largesse is getting us anything is yet to be determined.
What is unmistakable is that the studios would not be coming here to do business — filming action sequences in downtown Bridgeport, turning Southport into an Indiana Jones background, etc. — if it didn’t help their bottom line. These multibillion-dollar companies surely have legions of lawyers and accountants sifting every clause and subsection of every state’s tax code to work out their best cost-saving measures. Does anyone suppose our state lawmakers employ similar resources?
So it’s long past time to figure out just what all these tax breaks are getting us. If it’s gobs of otherwise impossible-to-reach tax revenue, all the better. If we’re getting nothing but “positive feelings” or “our name on the map” or some such nonsense, then these tax breaks deserve a quick hook.
The state has enough problems. If we’re not getting a good deal on offering tax breaks for movie studios, there are many better places our money could be going. For instance, to the residents of the most expensive state in the country.