Butte County Republican Party

By Steve Thompson, Chairman of the Butte County Republican Party

Recently on Post Scripts, Jack gave a good review of a great action movie called Battle Los Angeles. It’s a movie about some marines from Camp Pendleton defending a small area of Los Angeles from evil space aliens. Lots of action, shooting, explosions take place along with some good chest thumping bravado scenes. And of course the Americans save the day. It was a good movie and it made a lot of money at the box office.
It also made a lot of money for the location it was filmed. But it wasn’t filmed in Los Angeles.
You can read about it here in the Los Angeles Times.
That’s right, Battle Los Angeles was actually filmed in Louisiana! Baton Rouge to be exact. The people of Louisiana got a nice economic bump, as the movie production hired a crew of 200 people, 3,000 extras, and spent about $46.5 million on the local economy.
Does this seem strange to anyone? Why would a movie about Los Angeles not be filmed there? Isn’t LA the home of Hollywood, where movies are made? Isn’t Hollywood filled with liberals who hate capitalism and should be proud to pay more to film in their home state? I guess not.
It turns out that Louisiana offers a huge tax break for movie productions. The kind of tax break we don’t like to give the “rich” in this state because it’s wrong. But are tax breaks wrong, or just competitive for business?
Louisiana offers a 35 percent tax break for production costs of major films. California only goes up to 25 percent and they cut that off if the production goes over $75 million (which means most movies you see on the silver screen these days).
What it boils down to is that tax breaks work, especially for states that are competing for business. California is losing that competition, along with a lot of jobs, because we are no longer competitive. As businesses and jobs leave our state, you can watch the revenue to pay for teachers and police plummet. At least we can feel superior that we’re not cutting any breaks to the evil capitalists, I guess. Unemployment anyone?