481–490 of 490 posts
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PA Corporate tax is one of the highest in the country. Though it's not a terrible option.
How does that affect a company like Amazon that cam claim its primary HQ in another state, and its actual realized revenue as mostly in other states? What part of Amazon's profits would get taxed in PA?
I will "officially" hope AMZN chooses ATL (as leverage for a bigger raise) but ATL has problems. 1) traffic -- not sure it's possible to get to ATL airport in 45 min during rush hour, without using MARTA rail. 2) transit -- how much "developable" land has a mass transit stop on-site? AMZN would either have to buy a developed site or have a MARTA rail spur built. 3) ATL airport -- a certain airline has way too much po…
And that airline is increasingly big in Seattle as well.
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Except that I want to live in Atlanta even less than I want to live in Seattle. It has a kind of psychic oppression field over it that makes me want to immediately turn around and leave. Atlanta looks good on paper. It always does. But actually being in the city tells me a different story. That said, I think only Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, or Boston could absorb the extra demand for skilled employees without sucking the…
As an Atlanta resident, I find it a terrible place to visit but a great place to live. Great cities have (1) cool places to visit; and (2) lots of hidden gems - parks, restaurants, etc. - that take years to discover. Atlanta lacks the first, but has plenty of the second. That combined with good weather, great housing options and a Delta hub make it pretty nice to live in.
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Qualtrics, Domo, and InsideSales are in Utah Valley. Vivnt and Workfront are down there but aren't quite a billion yet.
None of those are in southern Utah. Utah Valley and SL Valley are Northern. Something like St. George would be southern.
OK, what are the options? Here's the list of the top 50 North American metro areas over the desired 1,000,000 population.[1] This gets down to the Nashville, TN area, at 1.8 million, so it's not the full list. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are probably out, both for political reasons and being islands. Mexico is probably out given the current administration's positions. San Juan is on an island and too remo…
Austin, Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, would almost be shoe-ins if they weren't in the middle or on the west coast. All have some public transport, and good universities. It would be quite a coup if a smaller more "standalone" city got it like Charlotte, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Orlando, San Antonio, Minneapolis, or Detroit. Not sure which of these could build public transport fast enough.
I would agree they probably don't want to be near extreme weather, but I don't think they would necessarily discount a city because of snow. Not having good universities could be a deal breaker. Dallas is the definition of sprawl, sorry Dallas.
I'll suggest a dark horse candidate: Indianapolis. Indy is close to two top 5 engineering colleges (UIUC and Purdue) and one top 10 business school (IU). Purdue has a unique product history with Amazon [1] and Amazon has four warehouses within an hour drive (though to be fair, that's true of a lot of cities). The city has seen major investment from outside tech companies like Salesforce [2], IAC [3], and others in re…
Unlikely. One of the requirements is daily direct flights to/from Seattle. Indy does technically have that but it's exactly 1 flight with poor timing for business considerations. They list a few other destinations as must-have nonstop flights, but I'm not sure how good those are. They're also putting a lot of stress on public transit, which is pretty abysmal in Indiana. They also don't want to sacrifice on some of th…
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Unless money is being funneled into private politicians’ hands, it’s not corruption. The choice is between amazon + tax breaks and nothing. These cities clearly believe that they’re better off, net net, with Amazon and they’re probably right. This is not at all the same as accepting bribes. There are certainly bad deals out there, but mismanagement is not the same as corruption. Now if you can show that the politicia…
It's a race to the bottom. It results in one state or city that pollutes for the whole country. Governments should set things up so the whole economy benefits, sometimes that means banning defections so that game theory doesn't fuck things up for everyone.
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The thing is, those tax cuts are largely offset by income taxes that those employees bring in, along with all of the $ that having a huge corporation like Amazon would bring into the area. It's not corruption, it's business.
In the US the cities don't get to collect personal income taxes, though.