A public school superintendent asked Gov. Rick Snyder to “make my school a prison” as he complained about proposed budget cuts in a letter to the editor he recently submitted to local papers.

In the May 11 letter, Ithaca Public Schools Superintendent Nathan Bootz wrote, “Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.”

The district confirmed this week that the two elementary schools and the high school each have their own media center and library. The high school also has a weight room. And in August of 2010, voters approved a $3.4 million bond for roof replacement and for technology equipment.

Bootz didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.

State Rep. Tom McMillin called the letter “inflammatory rhetoric.”

“The guy just can’t be serious,” McMillin said. “It shows they don’t want to live in reality and make a few tough decisions.”

The state of Michigan spends about $2 billion to house about 45,400 prisoners. The state spent about $12 billion to educate about 1.5 million students.

But students are educated 180 days a year for 7.5 hours a day. Prisoners are housed 24/7.

Students cost roughly $6.46 per hour to educate. Prisoners cost $5.92 per hour to house. Michigan schools also receive federal funding that isn’t included in this hourly rate analysis.

“I’m willing to give Mr. Bootz the benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t seriously mean to turn schools into prisons,” said Paul Kersey, the director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in an email. “But when he says that ‘Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society,’ he is revealing an incredibly self-centered outlook that permeates the public school system. Important as education might be, public schools are not the only things that matter. We have police and prisons to apprehend and isolate criminals. We have fire and EMS units to respond to emergencies. These are every bit as important as public schools. Mr. Bootz needs to realize that there are people outside of the school system and even outside of government who do valuable work, and who need resources to do their jobs.”

Another day, another self-interested plea for more state film subsidies that ignores the “cost” side of the program’s balance sheet and only sees its purported “benefits." This latest iteration appeared in The Detroit News and carried a typical woe-is-us title, “State door shuts on Michigan’s actors.”

The News apparently brought in actors for a roundtable discussion and they expressed “dismay” that Gov. Rick Snyder would actually cap the previously unlimited film subsidies at only $25 million. According to The News, “The actors say they don’t understand how something that helped put folks to work during a sluggish economy and brought a bit of glam to Michigan now faces such a drastic scale back.”

Allow me to explain. Government has nothing to give one person that it doesn’t first take from someone else. “Take from someone else” is the cost side of this equation that the film subsidy beneficiaries and proponents somehow never count. In this case, it means money stripped from other job providers and families, the loss of which diminishes their own ability to contribute to the economy.

Unfortunately, the people who receive the takings refuse to consider those real but “unseen” costs (or un-scene as the case may be).

That concept is effectively taught by a parable from great Henry Hazlitt in his classic “Economics in One Lesson”: A hoodlum heaves a brick through a baker’s window and runs off. The baker is angry, but a gathering crowd determines the brick thrower is actually a “public benefactor” who has generated revenue for a glass maker, who will then buy things from others “in ever-widening circles.”

Alas, those townspeople failed to see that that, if he didn’t now have to buy a new window, the baker himself would have made other purchases — ones that would create net additions to the economy rather than just replacing the loss of a broken window.

Yet the misguided conclusion of those townspeople is precisely the refrain of film giveaway advocates when they point to all the hoteliers, carpenters, muffin makers and coffee brewers now working on sets associated with subsidized film projects. Completely ignored are the jobs lost elsewhere due to the government redistribution.

Compounding the conceptual errors, The News article also made a common factual error. It repeats the Michigan Film Office claim that in 2010 “58 projects filmed in Michigan last year generated $294 million and created 5,310 production jobs,” and notes that the incentives cost the state $115 million, suggesting the program paid for itself.

It did not. What the Michigan Film Office report actually says is that those 58 productions spent $294 million. They did not generate anywhere near that amount in new tax revenue, but only a very small fraction of it.

Worse, the story compounds the misinformation by referencing a consultant’s report claiming that every $1 spent on tax breaks results in $6 in economic activity. Not disclosed is that — using methodology no more rigorous than the townspeople’s in the broken window parable — this particular consultant has been operating a cottage industry of churning film subsidy “success story” reports from other states.

The consultancy has been called out for its methedology in other states. Here’s one critique by a policy analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Not mentioned in The News is a different film incentive critique contained in a 2010 study by the Anderson Economic Group, which found that the film incentive was a net jobs loser for the state, possibly decreasing employment by more than 4,200 through 2009. Still another Michigan-specific report came from the Senate Fiscal Agency that estimated the film incentive program cost as much as $193,000 per direct job created. This and other film subsidy work by Mackinac Center analysts suggests a rap sheet that seems awfully lengthy to be ignored by reporters in stories like this.

The Snyder administration did the right thing by taxpayers and job providers by reducing this program to a $25 million grant item. The only fault of this change is that it was not reduced to zero.

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Michael LaFaive is director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.