Hello and welcome to the political orphanage. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, and today I'm going to get

into an argument about film subsidies with a famous Hollywood screenwriter, although in a very

polite way, he's a nice dude, and I am a coward, so we don't shout at each other.

A week or two ago, President Trump announced that the federal government will be levying tariffs on film shot in other countries.

And then his ambassador to Hollywood, John Voigt subsequently pitched a film industry wish list to the federal government, namely federal tax subsidies for the American film industry.

We will get into both of those things today, what the tariffs are, what they mean, but also what Hollywood really wants, which is film subsidies, which I am very

much against. I do not think we should take money from farmers, teachers, insurance claims

adjusters to prop up jobs in Hollywood in the same way that I don't think we should be taking

money from Californians to give to kale farmers in Ohio. Whenever we do that kind of thing,

we're making a judgment call saying, this profession, ballet dancers, is more valuable than the

professions we're taxing to fund it. Waitresses, waiters, whatever. But I will digress because we

discuss that and my kind of innate moral problems with subsidizing particular industries at the expense of others at length in the interview.

What I do want to do is point out a couple of economic concepts first, which will rattle around throughout.

I don't know how to lecture a guest on economics without sounding very condescending. So instead,

I'm going to inflict these two concepts on you, and Cargill and I will just jump into it

and both know what we're talking about. So first, multipliers is going to come up today.

A multiplier in economic terms is the same thing as saying the whole is greater

than the sum of its parts. It's government spending, which is so net positive, it pays for itself,

and then some. Some examples would be, let's say on one side of the Wabachah River is West Polycule, Texas, and on the other side of the Wabachaw River is West Polycule, Texas.

And on the other side of the Wabachah is East Polycule, Texas.

And presently, to get from one community to the other, you have to take a ferry or fly a hot

air balloon or drive eight miles south down to San Placenta to cross over.

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