Nevada Anti Film Tax Credit

TLDR: The governor and legislature are considering another massive tax break for giant out-of-state corporations. This time, it’s Hollywood that will benefit while Nevadans are on the hook. Sign this petition and make your voice heard: we don’t want economic development that sells out our future.

Our Republican governor is about to call a special legislative session. One of the things that likely includes? A massive tax giveaway to lure more giant corporate profiteers to Nevada.

When you think about Carson City giving tax incentives for billion-dollar film companies to come here in the name of jobs, I want you to think of a mom I met recently. She is employed full time at Elon Musk’s Tesla factory outside Reno, but she can’t afford rent. She earns so little she qualifies for Medicaid. And she sits in horrible traffic to get to the Tesla plant every day, while a huge chunk of her paycheck goes to childcare.

Now imagine being this mother, opening the news to see that over $1 trillion was just slashed from Medicaid — the only thing keeping her family’s health care afloat. Special legislative sessions are supposed to be for emergencies, and the loss of Medicaid funding is definitely an emergency.

But in announcing the upcoming special session, Gov. Lombardo says it’s to deal with “unfinished business” from the last legislative session.

And what was the unfinished business? Not the 856,000 Nevadans whose care is on the line. No, one of the biggest bills that didn’t quite get to the governor’s desk was a proposal to hand billions more in tax incentives to corporations whose CEOs make $52 million a year.

It’s being sold as a jobs bill, and with Trump’s economy, we need that. But we cannot make the same mistakes twice. Remember the woman I met — those are a lot of the jobs we got when we gave Tesla $1.2 billion to build a factory in Nevada 11 years ago.

Elon Musk got rich enough to buy the White House, and Tesla is putting together a trillion(!) dollar pay package for him. Meanwhile, most workers can’t afford to buy a house. And that’s nothing compared to rent, which has doubled or tripled for most people — while paychecks haven’t.

Sure, there were construction jobs, though those workers are struggling to afford life these days, just like everyone else. The factory jobs have a decidedly mixed record of stability and safety. The company is high on the list of employees that make so little they qualify for public benefits. And what happened when the abatements ended? Tesla laid off a bunch of workers.

No matter what, we all drive on the same broken roads, and our kids go to the same underfunded schools. We are already short on funding for firefighters and police, and now, with a slowing economy being helped along by our clueless president, we’re looking at having to freeze public service positions and do layoffs.

Big movie studios are not small businesses moving here out of the goodness of their hearts. These are corporate predators, looking to sniff out the best deal in the short term and move on when they can get a better one.

Also — and perhaps more importantly — we know film tax incentive deals don’t work! Just look at states that have offered similar credits. Michigan lost 89 cents for every dollar spent, ending up $500 million in the red while cutting schools and police budgets. North Carolina lost 88 cents, with only a few hundred permanent jobs created — most of them filled by workers from out of state. Maryland’s auditors even concluded its film credit was a poor use of public money and urged the state to redirect funds to permanent job creators instead of temporary projects.

It’s time to say “enough.”

We tried this with Elon and Tesla. And to be clear, I’m not saying I would have done it differently at the time — it was an experiment in generating more jobs and revenue for our state, which we badly needed. But the result was more trickle-down economics: The wealthy got wealthier, and workers, families and seniors fell further behind.

Nevada can write a new script.

Instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires and giant multinational corporations, we can tax them fairly. With that money, we fix roads, build affordable housing, pay teachers more and hire more of them, and build a sustainable state (because apparently we can’t even count on the federal government to follow through on clean energy commitments).

This, as a side note, is a big part of the answer to the question I get the most these days: “How do we fight Trump?” We stop giving billionaires tax breaks that they turn around and use to support Trump, like Elon Musk did. We cannot offer people like him tax-incentive footholds — you give them an inch, and suddenly, they are breaking almost 800 building codes tunneling under the Las Vegas Strip and getting slaps on the wrist for those violations.

Finally, to the film industry folks excited about this opportunity, I say this: We can invest directly in you, the people who already love it here and call this home. There is tremendous talent in this state, and given a chance, many of our own artists, entrepreneurs and businesspeople of all kinds can thrive on the biggest stages. There are ways the state can support your jobs that don’t depend on ransoming our future to international corporations for table scraps, and I will look for every opportunity to do that.

We should approach tax incentives and jobs by focusing on workforce development, training facilities and homegrown companies. That’s how we actually move forward.