Thanks to left-wing Hollywood’s never-ending greed when it comes to chasing the corporate welfare of overseas tax incentives, The Los Angeles Times reports that, since 2007, total earnings for Los Angeles-based musicians have collapsed 50%. The number of movie scoring jobs have also been cut in half.
The problem seems to be more than just tax incentives. It is also wages. Musicians overseas charge as little as $10 to $15 an hour. The unionized musicians based in L.A. command $75 an hour with the added expense of contributions to their health and retirement plans. Some orchestras require as many as 100 musicians. That adds up to $7500 an hour/$60,000 a day plus the contributions. A big budget feature film with a big score is probably into $1,000,000 within ten work days.
What is outrageous about this is not the concept of a business going around a union for a better deal elsewhere. Businesses have been doing that for decades. In a world economy, American unions are dying. Too many overprice themselves and refuse to wake up to the reality of a modern world and economy.
What is outrageous is left-wing Hollywood doing this to a point where union musician incomes and gigs are down 50%. With the explosion of cable television channels since 2007, you can’t blame a lack of scoring jobs.
These unions are victims of a wildly hypocritical industry that for decades has used every ounce of its considerable political muscle — money, star-power, and product — to bludgeon the rest of America with bullshit propaganda about the wickedness of greedy capitalism, about income inequality, about how higher taxes are good for the economy, and that old saw: businesses evil/unions noble.
All the while, of course, these Tinseltown Defenders of the Common Man and Socialism are running around practicing the mercenary art of vulture capitalism like a villain in their own dishonest movies.
What’s this you say? Unions can make it hard to create a profitable product?
I’m sorry, did you just say that lower taxes work as a production incentive that creates jobs?
Well, no kidding.
But nobody, and I mean nobody, has been taught anything but the complete opposite of that by what has come out of Hollywood over the last 30 or so years, including the politicians returning home with bulging pockets after a fundraiser with Steven, Jeffrey, and George.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC