Tariffs Won’t Save Us

Issue 23

By David Thomas Graves

The Illusion of Protection

If you’ve been following me, reading this blog, or just keeping tabs on the Beyond the Workforce series, you know I don’t pull punches. And I don’t waste time. That’s the whole point of this project. I write about the real economy, the labor economy, not the fake one Wall Street spins up on CNBC. I try to keep this series broad. I try to speak across industries, across unions, across political lines, because the truth is the rot is everywhere. The system is breaking down, not just in entertainment, but in construction, manufacturing, logistics, education, and healthcare. This is bigger than one sector. It’s a national failure to respect labor. Period.

But sometimes the best way to explain the system is to zoom in.

When I wrote The Great Collapse, I didn’t expect it to get the traction it did. That article hit a nerve because it wasn’t just about Hollywood. It was about the destruction of an industry that once offered dignity, mobility, and stability to working people. It was about what happens when short-term greed replaces long-term structure. And it was about how quiet that destruction is when the people crushed by it don’t have a mic or a lobbyist.

This piece is a continuation of that. But it’s also a direct response to something that just dropped back into the national news cycle. Donald Trump’s threat of a 100 percent tariff on foreign-made film and television.

What This Industry Actually Is

Now I’m not here to play politics. I don’t care which party drops the bad idea. I care what it does to workers. And this one? This isn’t just bad. It’s dangerous. Because film isn’t like other industries. It’s unique. To a fault. The way it operates. The way it’s financed. The way it’s structured. It’s fast, fragmented, and built on momentum. Most people, even inside the industry, don’t understand how it actually functions. Especially not the studio execs with billion-dollar contracts who haven’t produced a mid-budget film in twenty years. They don’t know how the sausage gets made. They don’t understand the financing stack of a fifteen million dollar indie feature. They couldn’t tell you the difference between New Orleans and Atlanta’s tax credit infrastructure if their lives depended on it. And they sure as hell don’t understand what happens when policy slams into payroll in the middle of prep.

That’s why I’m writing this.

Because tariffs sound good on TV. But if you don’t understand how this industry is actually built, how it’s legally structured, financially shielded, and logistically executed, then slapping a blanket tax on “foreign content” doesn’t bring jobs back. It just kills what’s left. California already started the job. The federal government kicked the legs out. These tariffs? If done wrong, and they will be, they’ll finish it.

This Is Not a Normal Job

The most dangerous thing about the film industry is how misunderstood it is. From the outside, it looks like a luxury export. Flashy. Optional. Not essential. But that’s not what this is. This is a logistics miracle that happens every day under impossible circumstances.

A key grip gets a call that the production has moved overseas. He now has 72 hours to figure out how to move gear, crew, and inventory across borders. A production coordinator is handed a pile of flight manifests, customs forms, gear lists, and housing requests, and expected to relocate a hundred people across the world with no lead time and barely enough budget to feed them. A UPM is forced to pivot on command because an actor gets sick or a location falls through, but the company still needs to shoot tomorrow. Electricians are pulling cable through the jungle, gripping it so tight their gloves are soaked and slipping because the humidity has turned every cable into rope soaked in oil. Human beings pushed to the edge after a ninety-hour work week are still expected to do one more day, stay one more night, prep one more location. Crew members who haven’t seen their kids in two weeks because they leave before the sun rises and come home after the sun sets. Moms who live full-time with their children but only see them on weekends.

That’s this industry.

It’s not glamour. It’s not fiction. It’s labor. It’s sacrifice. And it’s being hollowed out by people who couldn’t survive one prep week in the real thing.

The Tariff Is a Blunt Instrument

You can’t tariff a movie like you can a car. A car has a VIN. A product label. A port of entry. A factory of origin. A film is layered IP. The production might be based in Vancouver. The sound team might be in Burbank. The editor might be in London. The ownership might be split across six investor groups and a tax equity partner in Luxembourg. The actors might be under SAG-AFTRA but working under a Canadian schedule. And the final delivery might never even hit a U.S. theater.

So what part of that are you taxing? The footage? The residuals? The revenue stream? Are you taxing the advertiser that promotes it on Instagram or the streamer that hosts it on a U.S.-based server?

More importantly, how do you know if the content was ever meant for U.S. audiences in the first place?

If a movie is produced by a U.S. company but expects seventy percent of its revenue from international markets, are we going to penalize it just because the director was American? And if a foreign company produces a show for global release, but it happens to gain traction in the U.S., is that suddenly tariffed too? What happens when a production is moved overseas for creative reasons or logistical ones, not tax incentives?

Do they get a waiver? Do they have to prove their intentions? What’s the line?

There is no line. Because no one writing this policy understands what they’re trying to regulate.

What Really Happens When Things Shift

Take a U.S. independent production that secures financing from a French investment group. That group requires the film to spend sixty percent of its budget in Europe to trigger a co-production tax incentive. The script is written in English. The lead actor is American. The post is being done in Los Angeles. But the crew shoots in Budapest.

Or consider a television show produced by a U.S.-based streamer, with an American showrunner, but written to target the global market. The series is set in South Africa, with a predominantly international cast. It’s shot on location with local vendors, local permits, and a local crew. The only reason it’s being made at all is because the streamer can pull from multiple regional tax structures to make the economics work.

Then there’s the mid-budget indie that loses its lead actor two weeks before prep. The replacement actor is only available if the schedule shifts, and the only way to hit the new timeline is to shoot in Ireland, where crew is immediately available and the production office can be stood up in five days.

Now imagine an American documentary crew following a global humanitarian crisis. Half of their footage is shot in refugee camps across five continents. The post team is in Austin. The director is based in Chicago. The colorist is in London.

Are these examples now considered threats to American labor? Or are they just what happens when people try to make something with limited time, money, and tools?

These aren’t loopholes. They’re lifelines. And if your policy can’t tell the difference, it isn’t policy at all. It’s optics. It’s performance. It’s political theater.

This Is What Collapse Looks Like

Let me be clear. I’m not defending runaway production. I’m not defending offshore studios. I’m defending workers. The people in this country who depend on those mid-tier jobs, those five-week shoots, those eight-month series contracts. The people who build their year around forty hours this week and sixty the next. Those jobs don’t get saved by tariffs. They get erased.

What workers need is not another promise. What we need is clarity.

We need the people in Washington to understand that every time they write a policy based on optics instead of operations, they’re not targeting studios. They’re targeting us.

The first-generation rigging tech who just bought a house. The costume supervisor who’s two quarters away from paying off her student loans. The young PA who’s finally found purpose on set. The gaffer who survived the pandemic, survived the strikes, and now is watching another potential recovery turn into another stunt headline.

What Real Recovery Would Actually Look Like

The American film industry will not be saved by red carpet symbolism or inflation-era messaging. It will be saved by structural action.

We need legislation that protects mid-budget financing. We need a national grant strategy for workforce retention in regional production centers. We need a financing model that understands that film is a fast-moving, high-liability business that can’t afford the slow gears of traditional government support. We need union involvement at the policy level, not just on set. And we need a full cultural shift in how this industry is seen—not as spectacle, but as an economic necessity.

Because if we don’t start treating this work like it matters, no one else will.

Tariffs will not bring the industry home. What brings it home is belief. Investment. Infrastructure. Real policy with real reach. And a government willing to listen not to the studios, but to the people who are still trying to make something with what little is left.

The film industry is still worth saving. But it won’t be saved by people who can’t even name a department head.

If you want to save this industry, start acting like it exists.

An Open Note to Donald Trump

From the Working Class You Claim to Represent

Mr. President,

Your proposed tariff on foreign-made film and television content is not simply bad policy. It is a catastrophic misfire of the very economic philosophy you claim to stand for. And it exposes what so many of us working in this industry already know. When it comes to applying conservative business ideas to real labor industries, you are not interested in results. You are interested in optics.

You had a chance to prove that conservative economics could actually work for workers. You had a chance to show that streamlined tax structures, smart deregulation, and private‑sector momentum could rebuild an American industry faster than any bureaucratic program ever could. You had the perfect proving ground, and you threw it away.

You spoke with studio heads. With union leadership. With corporate elites. And you called it a task force. But these people do not actually know how the work gets done. They do not budget, hire, scout, insure, schedule, negotiate, or deliver. They manage. They license. They lobby. You spoke to the top floor and never walked through the loading dock.

And that’s why this policy is failing before it begins.

If you actually want to show that conservative principles can serve labor as well as capital, stop making policy by press release and start listening to the people who do the work. Otherwise, you are not leading a recovery. You’re watching a collapse.

Do better. Or get out of the way.

Signed,
A worker who actually understands how this industry runs

© David Thomas Graves 2025