They just won’t go away! According to the News & Observer, “Production companies can now apply for NC film grants.” Just wonderful.
These grants are a replacement for North Carolina’s tax incentives scheme for film production, and while the Locke Foundation has argued against film incentives for years and was glad to see them go, this scheme isn’t really much better.
The problem with these grants is the same as the problem with film incentives, or any other corporate incentives for that matter. By operating such a scheme, the government is picking winners and losers in the economy. In this case, the winner they’re picking is the film industry, and the loser is the rest of the economy that has to subsidize that film production through taxes. Every other business that doesn’t get a comparable grant is a loser. Why the special treatment for film production? Is that really so much more important than the thousands of other businesses operating across the state without such special treatment?
North Carolina has a lot to offer a variety of businesses, including television and film producers, which is why movies were made here before the incentives were ever in place, movies like Bull Durham, Last of the Mohicans, and Dirty Dancing. Rather than offering special grants or incentives to some businesses at the expense of all the others, North Carolina should level the playing field. Lower taxes and lighter regulation for everyone would help to attract film and television production, but it would also attract businesses in a variety of other sectors, contributing to the growth of a diverse, dynamic, broad-based economy. And that is the sort of long term, sustainable growth North Carolina needs.
