Article from Reason by Nick Gillespie.

Few investments are more famously fraught with failure than making movies. That extends especially to states and localities that attempt to lure filmmakers to their locales via sexy and economically useless subsidies that end up costing far more than they generate in new business activity and tax revenue. As the Tax Foundation reported in 2012, film subsidy programs generate between 7 cents and 30 cents in return for each dollar spent, guaranteeing a massive loss to taxpayer for every tax credit, rebate, or other handout.

In 2014, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo championed the creation of the Central New York Film Hub near Syracuse with $15 million of taxpayer money. “Who would have ever figured: Hollywood comes to Onondaga [County], right?” Cuomo said at the time, according to The New York Times. “You would have never guessed. But it has.”

Cuomo also insisted that the studio would generate at least 350 good-paying jobs related to the film industry. Instead, the facility, which was owned by the state government, was just sold for $1.

Unfortunately for local taxpayers, the buyer was Onondonga County, so the potential for continued wasting of tax dollars remains real. Syracuse.com reports that no permanent jobs have been created by the facility.

Read the entire article at Reason.

By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons