Colin McNickle At Large

Film tax & ‘clean energy jobs’ shibboleths

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How odd.

State Sen. Jay Costa of Forest Hills, the Democrats’ minority leader in the upper chamber, was honored recently by something called “The Elly Awards Gala” with “The Impact Award.”

For?

“Securing the necessary incentives to keep production” of “You Are My Friend,” the soon-to-be released film about the late Fred Rogers in Pittsburgh, reported the Tribune-Review.

Those “incentives” are public money, taxpayer money – $10.2 million — given through the commonwealth’s dubious film tax credit program.

“The movie will definitely have an impact on the city and Pittsburgh will be showcased on the big screen everywhere,” Costa said. He later talked up the program on KDKA Radio, offering the usual boilerplate of magnificent multiplier-effect benefits.

Indeed, as Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, reminded a few years back, when the government gives the film industry tax breaks, it puts more money in the film industry’s pockets. “If we’re lucky and the film industry spends that money in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania jobs appear.”

But, that’s not the end of the story, he adds.

“The money neither falls from the sky nor out of (the politicians’) wishful thinking,” Davies noted. “It comes out of the pockets of taxpayers who have to pay for infrastructure and state services the film industry uses. That means taxpayers will have to cut their spending by the same amount the film industry receives.

“Each dollar of stimulus the tax credit creates is matched by a dollar of anti-stimulus the tax burden imposes on taxpayers,” Davies reminds.

Davies went on to characterize this tradeoff in far starker terms:

Citing a 1995 study, he noted how film tax credits cost $90,000 per job “created.” Let’s say the film tax credit pot is $65 million.  That money given to poor families instead of the film industry “could lift almost 3,000 Pennsylvania families out of poverty and into the middle class,” the professor said.

Instead, feel-good groups hand out awards to those instrumental in fleecing taxpayers.

There’s been another shibboleth making the rounds, locally and nationally, involving “clean energy jobs.” But the Center of the American Experiment exposed those jobs for what they usually are – not directly connected to “clean energy.”

In a case study involving Minnesota, the center concluded just 2.2 percent of those supposed “clean energy jobs” were “non-temporary construction jobs in the wind and solar industries in 2018. Hardly a jobs panacea.”

The bottom line:

“While renewable energy advocates are quick to take credit for jobs that have little to do with wind or solar, they ignore the fact that rising electricity prices, caused by mandating intermittent, and expensive sources of electricity on the grid, results in significant job losses,” the center says.

Keep this in mind the next time a certain mayor or a certain governor start praising all those “clean energy jobs” supposedly sure to come but no more reflective of reality than those distorted street carnival mirrors.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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