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Tuesday Morning Film Credit Follies Roundup
September 22, 2009
The Des Moines Register reports that careless drafting helped pave the way for the film credit feeding frenzy:
"There were enough loopholes in this legislation that allowed very clever people from Hollywood and elsewhere to drive a Mercedes-Benz and a Land Rover through it," said Sen. Jack Hatch, D-Des Moines. "That's what has to be tightened up. That's not the intent."
It wasn't? Funny. It's hard to see how it would have been run or written differently if that was the intent.
Register political columnist Kathie Obradovich says there's plenty of blame to go around. She names names, but leaves out the star-struck media and its economically illiterate reporting on the program.
The Des Moines Register's editorial board questions whether all "economic development" tax credits are wise. Ya think?
Dave Price reports on the press conference held by the looters lobby. They aren't happy that looting has been suspended.
The center-left Iowa Fiscal Partnership gets it, sort of:
Those taking advantage of apparent lax management of the film-credits program may indeed be ruining it for other filmmakers who have not done so. Nevertheless, there is no justification for continuing this program while all the problems with it are being sorted out, and while education and fundamental human services are threatened with budget cuts.
But the blogger Coralville Courier really gets it:
Screw the tax credits, just let taxpayers keep more of their hard-earned money in the first place. Government officials need to quit making promises they can't keep and manipulating budgets and taxpayer money in the process. We don't need government officials making up programs that are doomed to fail. We don't need well-intended but substance free programs and liberal pipe dreams, we need basic, functional, efficient government. What we have now ain't cutting it.
Indeed.
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Comments
This is just like ACORN for Iowa. We should have had a conservative filmmaker come in and expose the office and how easy it is to take taxpayers for a ride.
Filming it like the ACORN filmmakers would have actually made it legal and eliglble for tax credits, of course. It's just that it would be a different type of horror film than planned in the application for credits.
Joe, isn't the real crime actually how Culver hired an independent audit when he should have properly called in Vaudt? That is the true coverup, no? I doubt he contacted your firm for the audit.
This is one example in which the coverup is worse than the crime.
Posted by: Brad | September 22, 2009 10:52 AM