Film Bill Has Nothing to Offer Nevadans

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/nov/14/film-bill-has-nothing-to-offer-nevadans/

Since the dawn of the New Deal, America’s billionaire class has waged a decades long campaign to chip away at working people’s power. Every time working people won fair wages, union protections and a seat at the table, corporations countered with dark money in politics, relentless lobbying and shipping jobs overseas. That struggle is alive and well in Nevada today.

A recent study by nonpartisan group the RAND foundation found that over the last 50 years, $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Tax cuts and corporate giveaways, such as the film credit bill being suggested by the Nevada legislature, have been a primary driver in this growing wealth gap.

Nevadans are facing a housing crisis, with a nearly 100,000 unit shortage of affordable housing units. Rents and home prices have skyrocketed, with more than half of Southern Nevadans unable to buy a home here. According to the Governor’s Office of Workforce Development, Nevada has the most expensive child care in the country. There is currently a waitlist of over 7,000 children unable to get a seat in Nevada’s pre-K program.

Meanwhile, billionaires got $4 trillion richer over the past few years, and Nevada’s favorite oligarch, Elon Musk, just signed a pay package to gift himself another $1 trillion in CEO pay. This, of course, comes partly courtesy of Nevada taxpayers, who granted Musk a generous tax credit package. He walked out of Nevada with our money contributing to his obscene wealth, without paying us a single dime in return.

At the very same time, billions were gutted from programs that benefit our most vulnerable. They were transferred upward through the Big Beautiful Bill — giveaways to corporations and the wealthiest 1% — while everyday families face rising living costs. While we get poorer and poorer, corporations continue to stack the deck in their favor.

Instead of addressing this imbalance, Gov. Joe Lombardo and legislative Democrats are following the national playbook outlined in the Big Beautiful Bill and facilitating a wealth transfer of their own. Rather than protecting the resources that benefit our most vulnerable, they are working with Hollywood executives to funnel $1.5 billion of Nevada’s scarce resources to multibillion-dollar corporations through a transferable tax credit scheme. The credits will be gifted to Sony, who will be allowed to sell them to any other corporation in Nevada. This includes our few revenue producers — like casino resorts. Meaning that these credits will take money directly out of our public services.

We’re told this is for “economic diversification.” However, the records from other states tell a very different story.

Michigan and North Carolina spent more than half a billion dollars before shuttering their programs, with Michigan citing that they lost 89 cents for every dollar spent. Maryland’s own legislative auditors concluded that their film credits were fiscally unsustainable, noting that the program pitted states against each other in a race-to-the-bottom bidding war for productions, leaving taxpayers footing the bill for corporate leverage. Shows productions like “House of Cards” and “Veep” even postponed filming until lawmakers handed over bigger subsidies.

Georgia, the so-called “Hollywood of the South,” loses 81 cents of every dollar it spends on film credits. Auditors concluded that if the state invested the money it routinely lost in schools, health care and infrastructure, it would create $2.2 billion in output and 27,000 jobs — far more than the film industry has ever produced. Even then, mass media conglomerate Disney scaled back its footprint in Georgia and moved productions elsewhere. In New Mexico and Massachusetts, they saw more than half of credited jobs go to out-of-state workers.

Sony is not promising that all of the studio jobs will go to Nevadans, it’s projected that half of the workers will move in from out-of-state. Most of the job projections, however, are for construction workers, a temporary job that will end once the studio is built. However, construction workers can build anything. Why, specifically, must they produce a movie studio? If we’re using public funds to create construction jobs, we could just as easily create thousands of construction jobs building light rail, affordable housing, hospitals or actually valuable infrastructure. And the studio can be built without a dime of transferable tax credits.

Nevada has a unique tax system, where public funds are derived primarily from sales tax. That means that lower income people pay a significantly higher percentage of income on taxes than wealthier people. By funneling those public funds into the hands of wealthy corporations, we are taking money directly from the pockets of the poor and distributing it upwards. Wealth inequality is not a mystery — it is driven by policies exactly like this one.

There is only one bipartisan consensus in Nevada politics — which is the continuation of the half-century-long wealth transfer from the working class to the top 1%. We need leaders who are ready to take on powerful interests, not line their pockets.