In my previous Corrupt California article, ‘Gov. Newsom’s $750M Gift to Hollywood Donors’, I chronicled how California’s latest destroyer and aspiring presidential candidate is cutting costs and giving more cash to Hollywood.

California has a $68 billion deficit, and Gov. Newsom is proposing $375 million in budget cuts for the California State University system, $68 million in cuts for wildfire prevention (even as LA is recovering from the worst fires in history) and doubling Hollywood’s tax credits to $750 million

Hollywood, which already benefits from $350 million in breaks, will get $750 million in tax credits even as money is being cut from education, public safety and even wildfire prevention.

The entertainment industry would be able to recoup up to 35% of their spending, up from the current 20%, and the subsidies would cover everything from sitcoms to reality shows.

The California Production Coalition, whose members include the umbrella trade group for Disney, Amazon, Netflix, Sony, Universal and WBs, has a list of demands that include lifting the $100 million cap on expenses, and, even more controversially, “above the line” costs of salaries for movie stars, directors and other talent which can run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Hollywood figures think that still isn’t enough. They’d like even more taxpayer money. More and more.

The latest industry figure to whine about how little taxpayer money Hollywood gets is Ben Affleck.

Asked on the film’s red carpet Wednesday about California‘s film and TV tax incentive program, the actor-producer told AP that state officials “came to take this industry for granted a little bit.”

While Affleck acknowledged that Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed more than doubling the state’s present level of support from $330 million a year to around $750 million annually in fiscal 2025-2026, the actor observed that “the percentage of what you get back in terms of the actual budget doesn’t compete with places like England, which is why you see a lot of these big, huge movies shoot in the U.K.”

Affleck also rattled off a litany of other states that have “better exchange rates or tax rebate deals,” including Georgia, New Jersey and Louisiana.

Let them go film in the UK or Georgia.

Tax credits for movies don’t create nearly enough jobs in proportion to the cost. They’re done as

1. a favor for special interests and donors
2. a way to mingle with celebrities
3. glamour and image

All of those are different ways of saying that they benefit politicians, not the people. All sorts of countries and states will hand out ridiculous tax credits to Hollywood, promising to build a “local film industry.” The only thing they ever build is tabs at local bars. Shooting in California is more expensive because of its cost of living issues. No amount of tax credits will fix that. Taxing the public to give the money to Hollywood to shoot locally will still run up against the hard realities of life in a state that everyone who isn’t Ben Affleck is being priced out of. And no amount of money will ever satisfy Hollywood anyway.

Should working people, already struggling, be subsidizing Ben Affleck?

The numbers, as I wrote, never add up.

Even the vastly inflated Hollywood estimates of jobs created and money spent is in the thousands (unless you also count their absurd numbers of ‘background performers’ or extras) compared to 130,000 truck drivers, whom California Democrats have been chasing out of the state, and over 4 million small businesses of which a third were shuttered by pandemic restrictions.

Gov. Newsom had no problem destroying all these businesses. He’s not giving Hollywood $750M to help create jobs. The amount of taxpayer money going to Ben Affleck should be zero.