News Busters
Michael Moore's schlockumentary "Capitalism: A Love Story" has been approved for a taxpayer-funded subsidy he once criticized.
According to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan Michigan-based think tank, Moore's 2009 film is set to receive an undisclosed amount of money from the Michigan Film Office.
Yet Moore, who ironically advises the state-run Office, told a forum in July 2008 that he was opposed to such subsidies (video of MCPP's findings on this matter embedded below the fold along with highlights from its January 28 press release):
"While we don't blame Mr. Moore and his production team for taking what is offered, it's striking that a movie focused on the inequities of granting taxpayer dollars to private enterprise would apply for and receive taxpayer-funded incentives," said Michael LaFaive, fiscal policy director at the Mackinac Center. "Government should not be bailing out or subsidizing Wall Street banks or main street filmmakers. As Moore knows, this marriage between government and business - in the name of creating and saving jobs - can facilitate every sort of mischief."
At a forum in July 2008, Moore seemed critical of the program, which provides filmmakers with refundable tax credits worth as much as 42 percent of expenditures for movies made in the state.
"These are large multinational corporations - Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch - that own these studios," said Moore at the Traverse City event. "Why do they need our money, from Michigan, from our taxpayers, when we're already broke here? I mean, they play one state against another, and so they get all this free cash when they're making billions already in profits. What's the thinking behind that?"
So, as Moore was making a film about evil capitalists taking money from regular folk, he was actually applying for a taxpayer subsidy from a state with huge fiscal problems and staggeringly high unemployment:
"Given the state's precarious fiscal status, should struggling families and businesses continue subsidizing filmmakers?" asked LaFaive. "How can a state with the nation's worst unemployment rate justify special tax favors to millionaire filmmakers?"
I guess this is just another example of the liberal mantra "Do As I Say, Not As I Do!"