OINK-OINK, THAT'S A WRAP! Federal taxpayers should not be subsidizing selling cigs to kids

The $240 million tax break for Hollywood movie and TV producers inserted in the "fiscal cliff" bill last week is not new. 
 
The bill extends a tax break (IRC Section 181) first granted Hollywood producers in 2004. Essentially, it lets producers immediately write off their first $15 million in production costs.
 
Porn movies are already explicitly disqualified from taking this tax break.  But movies with smoking are getting the subsidy, which means that federal taxpayers will continue helping to pay for movies that addict kids to cigarettes.
 
Movies with tobacco imagery should also be disqualified. Unlike porn, which is merely objectionable, smoking in movies kills thousands of people in real life. 
 
The U.S. Surgeon General concluded that smoking in movies causes youth smoking and two-thirds of state attorneys general, Democrat and Republican, agree on the harm and the urgent need to reduce kids' exposure. 
 
The federal tax code should not subsidize that killing.
 
It's not a First Amendment issue. If smoking is central to their movies, producers will remain perfectly free to include smoking in their movies. But you and I shouldn't be paying them to do it.
 
Whether Hollywood really needs this tax break is questionable. In 2009, a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate called it porkfat and voted to kill it. (If Congress does that, you KNOW it's bad.) 
 
The purported excuse for this subsidy is that movie productions are subsidized outside the United States. But despite federal and state subsides, the share of top-grossing movies produced by U.S. studios outside the U.S.  — about 30% — hasn't changed in a decade. 
 
In other words, since 2004, taxpayer subsidies haven't protected a single U.S. movie job. They've just handed the big movie studios — owned by America's biggest media and cable companies — more millions in profit.
 
It's also put taxpayers on the hook for filming billboard-size, star-studded "moving pictures" that push kids into the hands of the tobacco industry. Imagine what that de facto advertising will cost us decade after decade. Want to end it?
 
WHAT CAN YOU DO:
 
Write your Senator and Congressperson. Tell them that porkfat and tobacco are a lethal combination. Hollywood shouldn't get to write off massive physical risk to millions of kids a year. Disqualify smoking movies from the Hollywood tax break in the "American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012." Oink-oink, that's a wrap!
 
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/