(The Center Square) – A proposed 30% film tax credit is being pushed as a separate bill with a 25% tax credit scheduled to be removed from Gov. Tony Evers budget.
The tax credit is co-sponsored by Rep. Dave Armstrong, R-Rice Lake, whose full-time job is the Economic Development Director in Barron County, something Armstrong brought up in a Wednesday public hearing on Assembly Bill 231, which calls for a $10 million tax break for filmmakers and $199,300 in financial year 2027 and $254,000 the next year to fund three full-time employees in a film office.
Wisconsin is one of four states without film credits after prior film credits were allowed to sunset in 2013, Armstrong said. Armstrong noted that a 30% credit would put Wisconsin in the top 10 states in the country in terms of film tax credit percentages.
“How many of you, like me, get a little peeved when you are watching the credits and see the Georgia peach?” Armstrong asked. “I want a piece of that.”
The Georgia film tax credits, however, have been panned by economists as a tax cost that isn’t worth it for taxpayers.
Economist J.C. Bradbury of Georgia’s Kennesaw State University extensively studied Georgia’s larger film credit program, writing in a peer-reviewed paper that the state spent $230 per household on foregone tax revenue because of the initiative, which has cost taxpayers the equivalent of $110,000 per full-time job in the industry without bringing the promised benefits from the program.
Rep. Jerry O’Connor, R-Fond du Lac, said he is “a big supporter of this.”
“We really need to do this,” O’Connor said. “It’s almost like free money.”
O’Connor played a video of his wife singing karaoke at a Door County bar with Director John Stimpson of the upcoming holiday film “A Cherry Pie Christmas” during the public hearing on the tax credits.
Economists who have studied film credits don’t agree while supporters of the bill point to economic impact numbers from tourism departments to back the tax credits.
As Bradbury has pointed out, those economic impact numbers are pushed by economic development departments but they are produced by marketing groups that do not follow economic study principals and are not reputable.
“Viewing what ‘economic impact’ consultants do to be economics is like considering horoscopes to be astronomy,” Bradbury wrote.
