Whose Better for the Texas Economy: Hollywood Filmmakers or Texas Entrepreneurs?

Filmmakers and government economic development types are bemoaning the fact that Texas doesn’t offer as much as other states when it comes to film subsidies.

“Texas is losing jobs because we cannot compete,” said Janis Burklund, director of the Dallas Film Commission.

It may, or may not, be the case that Texas is losing jobs in the film industry. But even if that is true, what is missing from that equation is what Texans would be doing in the private sector if the money for subsidies had not been taken from them.

My bet is that George Mitchell and Glenn McCarthy, Gerald Hines and Trammell Crow, Michael Dell and Bob Rowling, etc., could do a lot more for the Texas economy with that money in their pockets than a Hollywood filmmaker. Especially when we consider the cut taken by the state to run the Division of Film Subsidies and the rest of the Texas State Office for Government-created Economic Development, or whatever they are called.