Georgia’s Film Tax Incentive Bombs at the Box Office

‘The Hollywood of the South’ was built on an absurd credit system that has proved unsustainable.

By Cole Murphy. He is a Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Studios started moving productions overseas when unions hiked the cost of labor and other cities and countries countered with even more generous offers. Now, millions of square feet of production facilities sit empty."

"The Georgia General Assembly expanded the state’s film tax incentive in 2008. Studios can receive credits equal to 20% of production costs incurred in-state, plus an extra 10% if they promote Georgia by putting its peach logo in the movie’s credits."

"every dollar the state awarded studios—$5.2 billion between 2015 and 2022—returned only 19 cents in tax revenue, an 81% loss."

"Film-related spending in Georgia peaked in fiscal 2022 at $4.4 billion across 412 productions. By 2025, however, the figure had plummeted to $2.3 billion across 245 productions. Marvel shot instead in the U.K."

"The subsidy-fueled gold rush emboldened unions to squeeze producers, warding off studios looking for inexpensive film locations. The 2024 agreement for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees raises standard crew rates more than 20% in Georgia, and the bigger problem is the Teamsters."

"Many producers interviewed spoke of shoots where Teamsters jobs swallowed as much as 10% of the budget. One described the highest-paid transportation worker as making “the same amount of money as the director of photography.”"

"Over the past 20 years, Michigan and Louisiana both implemented film tax credits, only to lose their industries to more generous incentives elsewhere." 

So many students are learning nothing at all and the American educational establishment is at fault

See Can American Children Point to America on a Map? In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all by Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University.

He reviewed the book "THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy," by James Traub. Excerpts:

"The real crisis of civics education, Traub discovered, is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.”"

"most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed."

"Not all state-funded schools are alike. About a quarter million American children currently attend so-called “classical” schools, many of them charter schools that receive public money but are privately run. In these schools, memorization and recitation are prized, as are classic texts from the Western canon, like Plato’s “Republic” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

Many liberals see red when classical charter schools are mentioned, because of their perceived religious bias and a feeling that such schools drain resources from less advantaged ones. One senses that Traub shared their concerns. But as his book progresses, these schools begin to appear as inspiring examples of more rigorous and civic-minded education for many young Americans.

Outside Dallas, he visits the Founders Classical Academy of Mesquite, a classical charter school with a student body that is nearly all Hispanic. Teachers there make great demands on the students and their parents, which seems only to spur them on. In a ninth grade Western Civilization class, children who had started studying Latin in third grade were reading and intelligently discussing an essay by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In a medieval history class at another classical charter school in Phoenix, one girl argued that St. Anselm must have been more popular in his time than Thomas Aquinas since Anselm believed, as Traub writes, “that faith preceded reason." She was in seventh grade.

“It was in classical schools,” Traub observes, “rather than mainstream ones, that I had most often heard the kind of reflective discussion that civic education seeks to foster.” Yes, a large part of the curriculum is devoted to old books. But “if you can speak thoughtfully about ‘The Nicomachean Ethics,’” he remarks, “you can do so about the fairness of our tax system.”"

Mass Deportation by the Numbers

ICE arrests are growing but fewer have a criminal history

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"It started out that way. At the beginning of 2025, 87% of ICE arrests were immigrants with either a prior conviction or a criminal charge pending, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.

But the criminal share of apprehensions has declined as the months have gone on. By October 2025, the percentage of arrested immigrants with a prior conviction or criminal charge had fallen to 55%. Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data.

Many of the criminal immigrants the Administration counts among those in detention are convicted criminals culled from prisons."

"but there’s no doubt Minneapolis and St. Paul have ordinances that bar using resources to help ICE apprehend people based on immigration status. That complicates ICE’s job and makes confrontations more likely."

"Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued."