The spectacle of states chasing movie production dollars — and, conversely, Hollywood figures pushing for state tax breaks — has gotten way beyond embarrassing.

Last month we had California governor Schwarzenegger gloating over the successful conclusion of his yearlong campaign to ease taxes for movie and television companies operating within his state. The Production Incentive Program — better known as the Ugly Betty tax credit, after the hit TV show that relocated from California to New York in 2008 — made it into an economic stimulus package contained in the state’s budget bill.

If the sight of an ex-Hollywood man cooking up tax breaks for his old industry isn’t enough to make you queasy, try this: Over on the other side of the country, actor Alec Baldwin is unhappy that New York governor David Paterson has threatened to end the state’s 35 percent tax credit for movie and TV production — the very tax break that lured Ugly Betty to the Big Apple.

In a recent television interview, the star of the NBC comedy 30 Rock, which is based in New York, predicted doom and gloom for the local industry. “I’m telling you right now, if these tax breaks are not reinstated into the budget, film production in this town is going to collapse, and television production is going to collapse, and it’s all going to go to California.”

Baldwin has been outspoken, to put it mildly, about tax cuts under the Bush administration, describing them as a threat to federal funding for the arts. In a post to the Huffington Post in March 2006, he decried underfunding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA): “Go and see your Congressman or Congresswoman. Sit down with them and ask them why the richest nation on Earth can’t afford dance classes for little girls in underserved rural parts of this country that are affected by the NEA’s budget. … A Republican-controlled Congress is killing important social programs that we all depend on, so that Bush’s friends can avoid paying a reasonable share of their taxes.”

But Baldwin apparently has nothing against special tax treatments for large corporations — as long as they’re in his own industry.

Give him the benefit of the doubt: He may have been thinking not so much about his own livelihood — let’s face it, he can shoot film anywhere and still make the big bucks — but about the 100,000 or so less well-heeled workers employed by the industry in NYC. Still, it’s hard not to read this outburst as just a teensy bit self-serving.

Will 30 Rock end up moving to California, there to be joined, perhaps, by a re-relocating Ugly Betty? Who knows? But it’s questionable how much further states can go in pandering to this industry without seeing diminishing returns. ###