Corporate Welfare for Hollywood Comes First

Corporate Welfare for Hollywood Comes First [Michigan Capitol Confidential]:
"With this year’s lame duck session drawing to a close, one striking feature stands out.
While lawmakers wrestled over how best to get funding to fix up and keep up Michigan’s roads, legislation to perpetuate the state’s flop-filled film subsidy program shot through the Senate and House like a hot knife through butter.
Make no mistake about it, the state’s film subsidy program is nothing more than a government-sponsored luxury; a giveaway paid for with other people’s money and — as always — those other people are the taxpayers. 
Over the five years of its existence the program has cost nearly half a billion dollars and there are fewer film jobs in Michigan now than before it started.
Politicians in Lansing, who love to talk about the importance of priorities, apparently felt supremely confident that the regular news media would miss the farcical joke.
It is no surprise that their confidence proved well-founded.
A bill to continue film subsidies zips through the Legislature ahead of a debate involving a potential fuel tax hike; and yet the irony of it doing so attracts little news media attention — not even a few sarcastic jabs.
No mystery here
If a script were written based on why the Legislature voted to keep the film subsidy program alive, it wouldn’t qualify as a mystery. 
It takes little imagination to understand the forces that were at work."