A Deficit No-Brainer: Cutting Welfare to Hollywood

Layoffs at Intel, out-of-control Medicaid expenditures, and oil still below revenucrats’s target price. New Mexico is in dangerous fiscal territory.

Can we cut welfare for Hollywood — and its unions — finally?

Dead-ender proponents of “film and television incentives” never tire of defending their faith-based policy. (Last week the Albuquerque Journal claimed that “New Mexico in general and Albuquerque in particular can thank television and film productions for keeping the local economies real.”) But facts are stubborn things, and the latest federal data are discouraging. In the third quarter of 2012, New Mexico’s employment in NAICS 51211, motion picture and video production, averaged 2,280. Three years later, it averaged 2,059.

The spectacular, and costly, failure to build a viable, sustainable entertainment industry in New Mexico surely ranks among the worst corporatist boondoggles perpetrated by the state’s taxpayer-compensated proponents of “economic development.” As legislators and the governor consider budget cuts for the fiscal year that starts July 1, the first place to start is a no-brainer.