Here are some of the stories I couldn’t get to last week:
Filmflam. It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Sara Okos with the Commonwealth Institute, but we see eye-to-eye on the subject of motion picture tax credits. The House of Delegates has passed a bill doubling the tax credit to up to $25 million over the biennial budget at a time when many other states are scaling back. Writes Okos in the Half Sheet:
The most rigorous studies show that motion picture tax credits aren’t effective generators of economic development. The jobs that they create are temporary and low-paying. In the movie biz, most highly paid, highly skilled workers are brought in from other regions, while low-skilled workers are the ones hired locally and take home only a fraction of the total wages associated with a project. Because the film industry is highly mobile, those jobs don’t last after a movie wraps.
House Republicans have lost their way. Seriously, how can they claim to be fiscal conservatives when they pull stunts like this? What’s going on? Are they hoping to pick up production of the Netflix political series “House of Cards,” which is threatening to pull up its sets and decamp to another state unless Maryland agrees to more tax credits? Yuck. If there’s a business dirtier than inside-Washington politics, it’s this one.
What’s happening in Charlottesville? Charlottesville appears in the list of 10 fastest-shrinking metropolitan economies in the United States, with a loss of 2.2% in gross metropolitan production, according to 24/7 Wall Street, the second straight year of decline. Yet unemployment remains at reasonably robust 4.6%. This makes no sense. I can’t think of anything that would account for such a shrinkage. Is this a statistical anomaly? Does anyone have an explanation?