151–160 of 227 posts
If they start handing out billions for corporate HQs it won't stop with Amazon. Google and everybody else will like up for theirs too.
Amazon would generate $30b in tax revenue over the deal length, for which it would be given a $3b break given certain conditions. That is not a handout, because amazon generated all the money in question.
I suspect I'll never get why the notion of giving a tax handout to a company that's one of the most valuable in the world shouldn't be a non-starter. > Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental…
This was different than organic job growth because of the number of jobs at stake: > Amazon chose New York and Virginia after a year-long national competition with 234 cities and states vying for the 25,000-40,000 jobs. For a sense of scale, the next largest economic development project the state has completed was for approximately 1,000 jobs What's the goal of tax policy? There's a) achieving the appearance of fairn…
I suspect I'll never get why the notion of giving a tax handout to a company that's one of the most valuable in the world shouldn't be a non-starter. > Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental…
I mean, it's pretty straightforward. When you set your basic taxes high enough, it no longer makes sense for some people to do business in your jurisdiction rather than another, so in order to convince those businesses to do business in your jurisdiction (and still generate revenue), you must reduce the effective tax burden on that business.
If you do not reduce the effective tax burden, they will leave (which is what you see).
The fact that some other businesses are willing to have some offices in your jurisdiction at full price is neither here nor there.
Use empathy to predict the behaviour of people under your system, and use accounting to get the figures; it is not difficult to see why tax incentives make sense in a place like NY. If you don't want to see your state and local government pander to individual companies, then lower the cost of doing business for everyone in the state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dear workers: you must remain poor and powerless forever, for the greater good.
Once again, we don't have to wonder whether this particular strategy worked. It demonstrably did not. Workers in NY state and at Whole Foods are worse off than they would have been. This is a setback for the effort to unionize Whole Foods.
I wish I could understand why you seem to think it's a no-brainer that workers should unilaterally resign what they see as their long term interests to accept unquestioningly a corporate agenda with uncertain benefits for them in an indeterminate future.
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NYC, San Francisco, and a few other areas have absolutely no need for incentives. They're very robust, energized areas, and don't need to beg for employers to come there and leverage the dynamics and workforce. Amazon's ridiculous dog and pony show -- which wasted outrageous amount of public time and money -- was absolutely dystopian: Company that already is one of the largest in the world, with an enormous competiti…
> NYC, San Francisco, and a few other areas have absolutely no need for incentives. I see you are not familiar at all where Amazon HQ2 was going to go. (Not NYC.)
If they start handing out billions for corporate HQs it won't stop with Amazon. Google and everybody else will like up for theirs too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NYC, San Francisco, and a few other areas have absolutely no need for incentives. They're very robust, energized areas, and don't need to beg for employers to come there and leverage the dynamics and workforce. Amazon's ridiculous dog and pony show -- which wasted outrageous amount of public time and money -- was absolutely dystopian: Company that already is one of the largest in the world, with an enormous competiti…
Long Island City is not Manhattan. They do benefit from giving incentives as they are not a robust, energized area. Thus the plastic factory/ superfund site with no jobs.
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The math isn't clear at all. Amazon is putting countless other businesses, who employ countless hundreds of thousands, out of business. That's just the nature of capitalism and efficiency, but when they demand special treatment to do so..that's just perverse.
For centuries businesses come and go. I am sure at every level of government incentives happen. Tax break is an incentive. Other businesses could get expedited approvals or permits, some might get licenses etc. Part of american way of doing business, really.
The economy has economic activity. That activity is taxed at various levels. When a leader, taking a huge slice of the activity, demands special treatment to take even more of the economic pie, the math is clearly bad.
I suspect I'll never get why the notion of giving a tax handout to a company that's one of the most valuable in the world shouldn't be a non-starter. > Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental…
You are addressing the quote: > You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner. I think you are here making a moral argument of sorts. Why is it morally better to get 100% of nothing than to participate in a project with incentives that give you 9 times return plus create 24-40k jobs? I simply don't see a viable argument that this was morally right, a…
In what alternate universe is this? Queens is hardly Camden or Detroit. The neighborhood in question has 40+ story office and residential towers sprouting up like weeds. Queens is at a record low employment rate ever since this started getting tracked at the county level: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYQUEE1URN. And there are similar statistics for the metro area. It is unclear to me that New York City needs to throw any tax credits for jobs when we are running probably very close to full employment.
- A vocal minority of leftists managed to force a silent majority. Once they won, they didn't really know what to do. Now everyone realizes that New York is worse off.
- All of the outrage started and snowballed on Twitter, where self-centered politicians decided to use it as a way to virtue-signal.
- The press did an awful job on this story: every article got a baked in narrative (From "Amazon was defeated and NYC won", to "NYC Lost and Amazon won"). It is simply very difficult to know what actually happened.