The state is not just playing favorites with beer companies. While we hear reports of police and firemen getting laid off, children starving in stigmatized housing, and brains rotting toward lives of crime for lack of educational opportunities – the state is giving tax breaks to that hobbled, decrepit, disadvantaged, permanent underclass known as the film industry.

The governor’s office and film industry advocates credit the upswing to 2010 legislation that provided productions with a 25 percent tax credit based on their in-state spending on goods, services and labor. The tax break is refundable, meaning that qualifying film companies who didn’t owe that much in North Carolina taxes get a check from taxpayers. . . . Critics estimated the loss in tax revenue to cost the state $60 million.