161–170 of 227 posts
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Should shelter, a basic human need, be for-profit? If so, why?
Profit motive leads to more shelter being built. The same reason why you want food production for-profit. Not everything works best with profit motive (eg, healthcare) but if you want affordable housing then maximizing profit motive will help produce more housing.
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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…
> 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? Because people who rail against deals like this take zero responsibility for any of the consequences. It's all of the fun moral policing and none of the downside. It's great to be an activist.
is that they never end up in a situation where they get 100% of nothing. Google and Amazon have thousands of jobs in NYC, and they will move thousand more there in the future. For these people in NYC, they don't know the consequences of not having loads of places to work. For them, it really is a situation of "Heads we win! Tails we win slightly less!".
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…
Not sure whether the moral of the story here isn't simply that a triple negative should be a non-starter
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should shelter, a basic human need, be for-profit? If so, why?
Here's a thought; do you want to rely on the goodwill of people you don't know, that live hundreds or thousands of miles away, to get up at 4am to farm and create food (a basic human need) for you? Or do you want to rely on the profit motive? If not, why?
So if a lot of people are willing to do work for a salary, why wouldn't a farmer or landlord be willing to do work for a salary? Why does a landlord need a profit motive? Why does a farmer need a profit motive?
I don't think you can argue that landlords are more attentive because they receive profit over a salary.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So in other words, you're suggesting that the handout was baked in from the get go because the HQ was in Queens, and Amazon being Amazon had nothing to do with it? If that's the case, the media have done a terrible job reporting this.
you're suggesting that the handout was baked in from the get go because the HQ was in Queens, and Amazon being Amazon had nothing to do with it? Mostly, yes. About $2.5 billion of the tax benefits were "as of right", meaning they're available to any company that fulfills certain requirements. There was also a separate Amazon-specific $500 million grant to assist with construction. More details at http://www.gothamgaz…
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> I think there's reason to debate whether large corps should be able to hold an auction like this It wasn't an auction. As the letter points out, each location put in a single, sealed bid, invisible to everybody else. There were no multiple rounds of bidding, as is typical for an auction.
You've literally described a silent auction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
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…
NY is not hurting for jobs. NY has so many jobs, in fact it doesn't have enough housing for the number of workers here. That's the real problem.