Research shows that film incentive programs around the country are not worth the cost in taxpayer money. Texas should follow Florida’s example and get rid of the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program.
Since the program was first funded 17 years ago, the Texas Legislature has appropriated more than half a billion dollars to subsidize moving image productions.
In 2023, the Legislature appropriated a whopping $200 million—maintaining the $45 million appropriated the past session and adding $155 million in supplemental appropriations.
As of September 2023, the Texas Film Commission boasted a 520 percent return on investment (ROI) over the program’s lifetime, which is a result at odds with other programs’ results in the country. It also claimed that more than 183,000 jobs were created, but no mention was made of whether this number was for full-time equivalents (FTEs) or if it included FTEs and part-time jobs alike. The ROI claims should raise major red flags in terms of transparency and honest inputs in terms of producing numbers that would merit such a claim.
As of September 2024, the ROI had dropped 51 points or a 10.9 percent decrease to 469 percent, which seems to indicate the program is doing more poorly than it did before. The number of jobs created was 189,000.
An open records request revealed that the return on investment is calculated using a basic formula of “(in-state spending minus amount of incentives awarded) divided by amount of incentives awarded.” The problem with this basic formula applied to a government program is that it omits what is not seen, such as the opportunity cost of spending taxpayer money to subsidize the moving image industry, indirect costs, and the likelihood that some productions would have filmed in Texas even if the program did not exist.
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