Don't blame DeSantis for the Disney "war"

Disney, a company that produces so-called family and child-friendly content, was pressured by activist employees, mostly in California, to oppose the Florida legislation.

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They chose this battle. Ron DeSantis is merely finishing it. …

Bob Iger contested, “Does the state want us to invest more, employ more people, and pay more taxes, or not?”

Pssst, Bob. There is no state income tax in Florida, so the only revenue the state would receive from more employees not directly related to an increase in tourism would be from sales tax. A loss to be sure, but not the devastating blow many are making it out to be.

[There’s more at the link. There may not have been income-tax revenue from those jobs, but there would have been secondary tax revenues from relocated employees. But that’s hardly enough to justify Disney’s status as a self-governing autonomous zone, which is what the Reedy Creek Tax District was in essence before this fight, and likely would have remained if Disney and Bob Chapek hadn’t picked the fight over the Parental Rights in Education Act. Furthermore, Disney doesn’t have the capital for that kind of investment in commercial real estate space or jobs expansion. They’re laying off 7,000 people and scrounging to save $5.5 billion at the moment, so there’s no way they would have moved forward on a billion-dollar project to create more office space in Florida. Even if they needed the space — which they don’t — it would make more sense to lease space as an operating expense rather than sink capital into assets in a market that is devaluing commercial real-estate assets to this day. Iger’s attempt to dress this up as a response to DeSantis is simply a virtue-signaling distraction from Disney’s financial woes, none of which have to do with DeSantis. — Ed]

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