Seems Snyder Is Rethinking Movie Tax Incentives

[bartock]

I still don't completely understand this film tax credit / incentive / whatever it was.

If it's Michigan handing free bags of taxpayer money over to the studios, then I'd be against that [[because it needs to be spent on roads, police, services, etc.); but if it's just a break on sales taxes or some corporate income tax, I'd find that easier to accept and promote.

Can somebody explain plainly what the tax incentives were?

In simple terms, it wasn't a tax incentive. It was a rebate on money spent. the State wrote a check for 42% of all expenditures on any project. Literally wrote a check for that amount. I believe 80% of the money had to be spent in Michigan.

I have plenty of problems with Snyder, but I don't think this re-thinking of tax incentives is in any way different than what had been suggested all along. The $25 million cap was a stop-gap while the re-thinking went on. To me it seems like a good idea to sit down with a mega-producer and director who apparently is looking in your backyard to film some $100 million dollar picture and discuss incentives. I doubt it will look the same as the old ones.

...and jokes about Republicans? C'mon. The original incentives were non-partisan/bi-partisan - a Republican/Granholm collab. The partisan lense is such a cop out.