Gov. Newsom’s $750M Gift to Hollywood Donors

California has a $68 billion deficit, and Gov. Newsom is proposing $375 million in budget cuts for the California State University system, $68 million in cuts for wildfire prevention (even as LA is recovering from the worst fires in history) and doubling Hollywood’s tax credits to $750 million

Hollywood, which already benefits from $350 million in breaks, will get $750 million in tax credits even as money is being cut from education, public safety and even wildfire prevention.

The entertainment industry would be able to recoup up to 35% of their spending, up from the current 20%, and the subsidies would cover everything from sitcoms to reality shows.

The California Production Coalition, whose members include the umbrella trade group for Disney, Amazon, Netflix, Sony, Universal and WBs, has a list of demands that include lifting the $100 million cap on expenses, and, even more controversially, “above the line” costs of salaries for movie stars, directors and other talent which can run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Should California taxpayers really be covering Tom Cruise’s salary? Hollywood thinks so. And the powerful Hollywood donors to California Democrats means that they usually get their way.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a recall after a corrupt pandemic lockdown system that kept churches and small businesses closed, but allowed movie and TV productions to do whatever they wanted, Hollywood donors showed up to throw millions at Newsom. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings kicked in $3 million, Universal, Paramount and top celebrities also stepped up.

A ‘virtual’ event chaired by Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, raised over $1 million to keep Newsom in office. FOX, Sony and other executives wrote checks for thousands of dollars.

Now Gov. Newsom is paying up.

Last year, Disney’s ‘Paradise 2’, a series about political corruption, fittingly received over $12 million, ‘Untitled WB Film’ got $20 million, ‘Untitled Disney+ Project’ picked up $14 million, ‘Suits LA’ got $12 million to shoot in LA, ‘LA Nights’ got $19 million to also shoot in LA, Apple’s ‘Bad Monkey 2’ got $20 million and ‘Untitled Drag Queen Movie’ got $1.6 million.

Gov. Newsom and California Democrats claim that these massive giveaways to huge studios are vitally necessary to keep the film industry in Los Angeles or it’ll move on to Georgia. That must be why Newsom also exempted Hollywood from pandemic restrictions. But it doesn’t explain why he shut down virtually everything except those same Hollywood productions.

California Democrats have gone after virtually every major industry in the state, starving agriculture industries of water through environmental restrictions, dismantling trucking with a ban on freelance workers, taxing and banning oil and gas, and shoving out defense industries, all the while raising business taxes through the roof and sending companies fleeing to Texas.

Yet when it comes to Hollywood, Gov. Newsom and his legislative supermajority claim that keeping this particular industry in California is so vital that no amount of subsidies is too great. State Democrats are willing to slash education spending just to keep movies in California.

And yet Hollywood’s actual impact on California is limited.

Despite false industry claims, Hollywood tax credits are a consistent net loss for the states that offer them. States don’t offer tax credits because they have any meaningful impact, but because the film industry is glamorous, its lobbyists keep calling and celebrities keep writing checks.

Even the vastly inflated Hollywood estimates of jobs created and money spent is in the thousands (unless you also count their absurd numbers of ‘background performers’ or extras) compared to 130,000 truck drivers, whom California Democrats have been chasing out of the state, and over 4 million small businesses of which a third were shuttered by pandemic restrictions.

Gov. Newsom and California Democrats didn’t even blink at killing 7,500 small businesses during the pandemic, which employed far more people than the Hollywood productions do. If they really cared about jobs, they’d be providing massive tax breaks for some of those small businesses instead of writing $20 million checks to Disney and Netflix to “create jobs”.

Perversely, Hollywood lobbies keep demanding more subsidies because of the supposed impact that the pandemic had on their productions that they still haven’t “recovered” from even five years later. But of all the businesses in the state, Hollywood studios had the fewest restrictions on their behavior. That’s why small cafes had to close and watch while Hollywood crews set up craft services in their parking lots.

Hollywood had so much influence that when LA slapped a lockdown on everyone, and asked productions to avoid stirring up bad feelings by restricting filming to the same hours as other businesses, industry anger forced cringing officials to withdraw their request and only asked them “to voluntarily limit and/or avoid activities likely to invite a negative community response”.

Small businesses in LA did not get requests to “voluntarily” do anything. They had their power and other utilities cut off if they did not comply. The general public was not issued voluntary requests to wear masks or stay out of parks. Instead, California Democrat officials chained off entire areas, blocked park benches and set out to criminalize any lockdown dissent.

Except for Hollywood.

Gov. Newsom and California officials declared that “workers supporting the film, television and commercial production industry” were “essential for the state’s critical infrastructure.” It did not clarify which part of California’s “critical infrastructure” the movies and bad sitcoms made up.

The double standard was obscenely corrupt then and it’s corrupt now.

5 years after receiving unprecedented exemptions, Gov. Newsom and California Democrats are providing unprecedented subsidies to Hollywood because of their supposed pandemic suffering.

“Hollywood workers have endured a difficult last few years, starting with the pandemic,” the LA Times claimed in defending Newsom’s $750 million in subsidies.

What about the rest of the state’s workers and the millions of jobs that were lost there? And many of those, unlike “background performers”, were actual good lifelong jobs.

Hollywood productions don’t even create stable jobs because of their erratic nature. They’re even less stable (and often more abusive) than the Uber and Lyft.jobs that California Democrats had declared war on and have tried to regulate out of existence. But they are heavily unionized.

And the top players are major funders of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat majority.

Gov. Newsom is not proposing to double tax credits for Hollywood because of the economic benefits to the state, but the economic benefits to his future presidential campaign. Democratic presidential campaigns live and die by the money they gain from three industries: Hollywood, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That was why Biden and Kamala had so many Hollywood fundraisers. Now Gov. Newsom is bribing Hollywood with $750 million in taxpayer money in the hopes that they’ll pay at least 10% of that forward to his 2028 presidential campaign.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/2766206860324944134/comments/default