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NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

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Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#291

Post by brownbat »

linkmotif wrote: post #280
brownbat wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please tell me what about this is bad. Opportunity costs? You list several benefits, but benefits don't tell us where a choice ranks in the list of possible alternatives. For example, the alternative where we get all those benefits, but where there weren't any incentives at all, seems strictly better. Why not that? You'd probably protest that it's not realistic. We can't get there in the current system, where power…

Do you buy things on Amazon?

Who cares?

Amazon is a great company in a lot of ways, not great in some other ways, and none of that has anything to do with my opinions on local governance.

Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, this Amazon story isn't really about Amazon anyway.

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#292

Post by jniedrauer »

linkmotif wrote: post #280
brownbat wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please tell me what about this is bad. Opportunity costs? You list several benefits, but benefits don't tell us where a choice ranks in the list of possible alternatives. For example, the alternative where we get all those benefits, but where there weren't any incentives at all, seems strictly better. Why not that? You'd probably protest that it's not realistic. We can't get there in the current system, where power…

Do you buy things on Amazon?

Would it be fair to ask coal miners in the early 20th century if they shop at the company store?

Large retail companies are ubiquitous in our society. It takes a certain degree of socioeconomic privilege to be able to choose not to buy things from them.

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#293

Post by linkmotif »

brownbat wrote: post #291
linkmotif wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you buy things on Amazon?

Who cares? Amazon is a great company in a lot of ways, not great in some other ways, and none of that has anything to do with my opinions on local governance. Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, this Amazon story isn't really about Amazon anyway.

Because the reason you buy things on Amazon is because they get you the best deal and they get you the best deal because they get the best deals. They get the best deal by exploiting workers in American warehouses, exploiting workers in Chinese factories or exploiting the citizens of New York. Either way, exploitation gets you that deal. Those guys who aren’t as effective at exploitation as Amazon? Well, you don’t shop with them, do you?

Now if you weren’t a price or convenience-sensitive consumer who didn’t shop on Amazon out of moral conviction, I would at least respect your perspective. But if you shop on Amazon, I’m not sure you get to quote Yogi Berra.

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#295

Post by Fjolsvith »

linkmotif wrote: post #293
brownbat wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? Amazon is a great company in a lot of ways, not great in some other ways, and none of that has anything to do with my opinions on local governance. Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, this Amazon story isn't really about Amazon anyway.

Because the reason you buy things on Amazon is because they get you the best deal and they get you the best deal because they get the best deals. They get the best deal by exploiting workers in American warehouses, exploiting workers in Chinese factories or exploiting the citizens of New York. Either way, exploitation gets you that deal. Those guys who aren’t as effective at exploitation as Amazon? Well, you don’t sh…

Well, Yogi also said that if the world was perfect, it wouldn't be. So I keep shopping at Amazon.

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#296

Post by grecy »

vdnkh wrote: post #32

1) Incentives are not given up front. They are given proportional to the results Amazon has achieved. Amazon must make a report each year detailing their progress before any award is given. 2) The city-level incentives are available to any business. State-level incentives (I think 300m) are not. 3) Amazon has pledged to invest in the local community as part of the deal. There are plans for an elementary school and te…

> Please tell me what about this is bad.

A trillion dollar company is getting subsidies, when they should be helping to build and grow the society that created them.

Healthcare in America is disgraceful. Absolutely the worst in the developed world. Tens of millions of people in your country live on food stamps. Tens of millions work multiple jobs and are still considered "in poverty". Higher education is so expensive it's prohibitive or puts people in crushing debt for a very long time. General infrastructure is horrendously bad.

The whole point of a society is that everyone contributes to make it better for everyone. When a trillion dollar company gets to pay less that they're supposed to, it makes society worse, not better.

The goal of the society should be to make life better for everyone living in it NOT to raise the stock price of what is already one of the biggest companies in existence.

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#297

Post by pasbesoin »

rayiner wrote: post #161
pasbesoin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ameritech/SBC, now AT&T, received, IIRC, circa $750 million in incentives to deploy universal access to high speed Internet throughout Illinois. The ink was hardly dry when they turned around and lobbied the Illinois legislature to let them out of their side of the deal -- while keeping the incentives. The current Foxcon deal in Wisconsin is looking more and more like Foxcon won't be coming through on all their rosy…

> Ameritech/SBC, now AT&T, received, IIRC, circa $750 million in incentives to deploy universal access to high speed Internet throughout Illinois. Are you talking about the Ameritech/SBC merger?

It was around that time; I no longer remember what name they were carrying at what points during that process.

They subsequently acquired the remains of AT&T; a few other things, and the name with which they subsequently rebranded themselves.

My point was more the "money for nothing" aspect; I merely don't remember off the cuff what exact name/branding they had at that point in time. Ameritech got bought out by ("merged with") SBC. Then the "merged" SBC bought the remaining piece of AT&T that included the name. A lot of the tech stuff, that had ended up in Lucent, went instead to Alcatel, IIRC (making a hole in the Omaha tech scene, among other things).

P.S. That's how I remember it, now. I wasn't involved -- well, other than being rather thoroughly shafted by then Ameritech/SBC (and now I seem to recall their carrying such a combined name, during the transition) on a home DSL deployment. I ended up learning from their own rather thoroughly demoralized tech support that almost all of that was outsourced: Installations, IT, etc. One actual Ameritech/SBC employee (or was it before the SBC "merger"?... sigh) told me that all they could do was file tickets. Those went to third parties, and they couldn't do a damned thing about following up on them.

Doing a tracert showed over ten hops -- sometimes well over, before your packets even left their "network" to the wider world. And that was the least of the customer's problems...

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#298

Post by ojbyrne »

Digital-Citizen wrote: post #261
CPLX wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're literally giving New York tax money to the richest man in the world, who lives somewhere else, instead of spending it on the subway, or parks, or schools, or literally anything. If you're not outraged you're not paying attention. As it happens I don't have a Silicon Valley venture backed profitless startup, I have a company that gets paid money to do work and makes a healthy profit. I've paid very considerable…

Richard Wolff in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTth4Rb25H4 does a good job of concisely making the points on just how bad a deal this is for New York and Virginia (which are together funding over half of the costs of this project -- $5.5B versus Amazon's $5B according to the New York Times) -- and all for an estimated 2,500 jobs in New York. Here's what he said: This is a shocking display. What they are calling a g…

Isn’t the projected number of jobs 25,000?

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#299

Post by samspenc »

CydeWeys wrote: post #171
marricks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t NYC have a housing crisis already? I’m not sure they need a worse one coupled with the gentrifying forces of thousands of tech employees moving in. $1.5 billion in housing or just really anything to help people who already live there is what should happen.

No, NYC doesn't have a housing crisis. Rents are certainly higher in NYC than the average for the nation, but there are plenty of relatively affordable areas within an hour's commute of downtown, and the only transportation cost you'd pay is $116.50/month for a MetroCard. Subtract out all the substantial costs of paying for an automobile and NYC can even compare favorably in cost of living to some other cities that h…

Just a note from someone who moved from NYC to a suburban area a few years ago: a car doesn't cost that much (as I thought anyway). Outside of the fixed costs, insurance is about $70 a month, and gas at $60 a month, so that's about $130 in total a month, just a bit over the $116 in unlimited train rides in NYC. (And yes the fixed costs are much higher, I will admit.)

Re: NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

#300

Post by twblalock »

$48k per Amazon HQ job is about the the annual federal income tax of a software engineer at Amazon, and it's 4-5 years of New York state income tax. This assumes an annual total compensation somewhere around $200k.

Some people will tell you that such a compensation is not realistic, but at Amazon it is common for mid- to senior-level engineers to make at least that much.

Altogether it is not a total sellout on the part of New York, at least not after 5 years. Ideally some of those Amazon engineers will leave Amazon to join other companies or start their own, which will be good for New York.

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