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Supporters Hopeful Film Tax Credit Will Be Ressurected

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On this West Virginia Morning, West Virginia’s film tax credit was eliminated by the West Virginia Legislature in 2018 after a legislative audit report deemed the credit as providing only “minimal economic impact.” But people who work in the film industry don’t agree. An attempt to resurrect the credit failed this past legislative session, but Liz McCormick reports supporters are hopeful it will make it through next year’s session.

Also on today’s show, low-income Americans are dying at a higher rate than high-income Americans. In fact, recently life expectancy for low-income Americans has begun to drop – a trend largely attributed to drug and alcohol related deaths, popularly called deaths of despair.

“The least well off Americans have seen their wages become stagnant, their jobs become obsolete, their neighborhoods crumbling in various ways. And so there’s a thought that that leads to despair or less educated Americans and they turn to drugs or suicide,” University of Michigan professor Arline Geronimus said. She’s was the lead researcher on a new study that argues higher rates of death among low-income Americans are due to inequity, not despair. We hear the rest of her conversation with health reporter Kara Lofton.

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