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Hollywood is back at the trough, asking hardworking American taxpayers to bankroll the entertainment elites under the bland name the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act. President Trump publicly urged Congress to craft a federal production incentive to “save” the industry, and now lobbyists and celebrity ambassadors are sprinting to Washington with their hands out.
What they want is a federal tax credit that could be layered on top of the generous state incentives that already exist, a move that would essentially let well-heeled studios pick the pockets of everyday Americans to subsidize glossy backlots and executive bonuses. Details are thin and shifting — pundits report talk of a roughly 20 percent base credit and bonus sweeteners, but no concrete bill text has been filed for scrutiny.
Big labor and the industry establishment are already aligned behind the pitch, with the Motion Picture Association, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and celebrity emissaries loudly championing the plan as a jobs rescue. That unity doesn’t make the policy wise — it makes it predictable: unions and corporate producers want federal money to shore up their declining negotiating leverage and profit margins.
Industry-funded studies promise hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in production spending if Washington ponies up, but these forecasts are colored by interested parties and optimistic elasticity assumptions. The taxpayers paying for this won’t get a line-item on the trade balance showing how many of those supposed “jobs” would be new rather than shifted from one state to another or inflated by temporary set builds.
We should also remember how states have already spent fortunes competing to lure shoots with credits and rebates, warping incentives and rewarding tax arbitrage instead of true innovation. A federal credit only doubles down on that race-to-the-bottom mentality and hands the entertainment cartel a national safety net while Main Street folks foot the bill.
Conservatives who genuinely care about American workers should oppose corporate bailouts dressed up as “revitalization.” Instead of writing blank checks to Hollywood, Congress should cut the regulatory chaff, lower broad-based taxes that help small businesses and creators, enforce trade rules to prevent foreign subsidized dumping of content, and let competitive markets reward winners without Washington picking winners and losers.
Steve Forbes and other free-market voices are right to call out this proposal as a false remedy: the answer to Hollywood’s problems is not another entitlement for elites but fiscal sanity and a principle that taxpayers won’t underwrite private risk. Lawmakers should give the industry the same message real Americans get every day at work — tighten your belt, compete, and stop asking for bailouts.
