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The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

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Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#71

Post by bradleyjg »

codyb wrote: post #69
bradleyjg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MTA's problems have far more to do with inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption than they do with a lack of money. A big part of the problem is that it doesn't have an accountable governance structure. The current MTA board is made up of appointees of: the governor, the mayor, and the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, and Orange counties. There needs to be one elected offici…

Huh, I just looked it up, I guess the Mayor represents the five burroughs but you'd think Kings, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island would have representatives that represent them alone if Nassau, Rockland, Putnam, and Orange counties do. Bizarre.

It gets even more bizarre. Rockland, Putnam, and Orange get board members but they only get 1/3 of a vote each. Three different unions get non-voting board members, as do three commuter councils (which are in turn not membership organizations but made up of political appointees).

I'm amazed they even manage to even get minutes printed with a board organized like that.

Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#72

Post by BonesJustice »

closeparen wrote: post #61
BonesJustice wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with all these posts that just assume that 25,000 new humans are going to be plopped down in NYC? Has Amazon come out and said that they’re going to be relocating 25,000 employees here? If not, then I suspect a solid majority of those hired will already be living and working in the greater NYC area. In those instances, any gain in income tax revenue will be meager.

Do you think 25,000 positions are going to disappear from the rest of the local economy? New York City's population growth from 2010-2017, without Amazon, averages out to 64k/year [0]. Adding 25,000 humans to New York is an entirely ordinary and expected occurrence that's been playing out every 4.5 months, not some sort of outrageous hypothetical. [0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning

No, I don’t think 25,000 positions will disappear. I think many previously filled positions will become unfilled as those employees get hired by Amazon.

Obviously, many (most?) of those positions will in turn be filled by someone else (and so on). But because of a strong preference to hire locally, that imbalance tends to ripple through the local labor market for some time before enough new labor is brought in to cancel it out.

Point is, dropping 25,000 “new jobs” into the local economy does not result in an automatic gain of 25,000 new taxpayers, so acting like it’s an automatic $3.75 billion in net new taxable income is just absurd. Eventually it may get close to that number, but there will be a significant lag before it gets there.

Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#73

Post by BonesJustice »

cthalupa wrote: post #64
BonesJustice wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with all these posts that just assume that 25,000 new humans are going to be plopped down in NYC? Has Amazon come out and said that they’re going to be relocating 25,000 employees here? If not, then I suspect a solid majority of those hired will already be living and working in the greater NYC area. In those instances, any gain in income tax revenue will be meager.

Any time a new job is created somewhere, regardless of whether or not it is filled by someone who was already local or not, the total number of available jobs + filled jobs goes up, as long as positions are backfilled. Positions usually are backfilled. So even if every person that works at Amazon NYC already lived in NYC, they will have left 25,000 other jobs that are now available. There are a few ways in which thes…

Yes, exactly. There is an inherent and substantial lag between the time when 25,000 new job ‘capacity’ is added to the local labor market vs. when that capacity is filled.

Obviously, the mere presence of another employer seeking out highly skilled talent will have other effects, like raising wages and rent.

Like you, I don’t know whether this deal will be a net win or not. And I’m not suggesting Amazon has to bring in 25,000 new people for it to be a gain.

I’m just calling nonsense on the posts with impossibly optimistic math (“25k jobs x $150k/yr = $3.75B in new taxable income, so it’s obviously a win, Q.E.D.”).

Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#74

Post by codyb »

bradleyjg wrote: post #71
codyb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I just looked it up, I guess the Mayor represents the five burroughs but you'd think Kings, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island would have representatives that represent them alone if Nassau, Rockland, Putnam, and Orange counties do. Bizarre.

It gets even more bizarre. Rockland, Putnam, and Orange get board members but they only get 1/3 of a vote each. Three different unions get non-voting board members, as do three commuter councils (which are in turn not membership organizations but made up of political appointees). I'm amazed they even manage to even get minutes printed with a board organized like that.

Yea I was checking it out and mainly focused on voting members for my post. Who knew? It's something I'd never even thought of until now. Seems like something that might be worth looking into as a New Yorker considering these fifteen or twenty people are making decisions that affect six million riders a day along with countless bridge crosses and ferry takers.

Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#75

Post by [deleted] »

intopieces wrote: post #36

Eh. Everyone is acting like $3B is some massive some of money. The State of New York recently sealed a budget for ~$168B and and the economy of the state itself is somewhere around $1.2T. Hell, Amazon itself has a market cap of nearly 800B. As of 2017, "[m]ore people are leaving the New York region than any other major metropolitan area in the country": https://nypost.com/2017/04/01/people-are-fleeing-new-york-at...…

[deleted]

Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#76

Post by erikpukinskis »

jefftk wrote: post #48

We should ban these kinds of deals at the national level. They're rational for companies, and rational for regions, but overall they allow extremely large companies to avoid paying their share of taxes.

They do seem to open up a much more complex calculus in the tax system.

I think you can make an argument that these deals can improve efficient allocation of capital. But like credit default swaps and other complex financial instruments, I think you run into the issue of, is there a level of complexity that's just too much for the rest of the system to be rational around.

One of the purposes of tax structures is to allow people to make predictions about what the exact financial consequences of various choices they might make. If you add this kind of one-off negotiation into that, you undermine our collective ability to be rational about our financial choices.

However, if you allow this kind of negotiation, and you allow governments to try to compensate organizations for the systemic benefits they bring to an economy, that also has some utility. You can create an incentive to these organizations to create value outside of just their bottom line. And if we allow these kinds of deals, then over time we'll be able to systematize them and then eventually make them broadly available under standard terms.

So, I don't know. I'm not sure rushing to an outright ban is the way to go. But I do think there's some merit to the idea that in financial transactions there's a limit to how far the contracts can be recursive. Allowing it to be infinite makes for a chaotic fuzzy edge to the markets.

Re: The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters

#77

Post by ricardoreis »

oculusthrift wrote: post #44
bradleyjg wrote: post #11

For the nation as a whole it's a bad deal, in a prisoner's dilemma if everyone cooperates the payoff matrix is globally optimal. But for New York City it's a good deal, and those claiming otherwise refuse to look at the math and instead want to go with how the deal makes them feel. $150,000 x 25,000 = $3.75B/year. At NYS + NYC effective tax rate of around 9.25% at that income level that's around 350MM in income tax a…

>> those claiming otherwise refuse to look at the math and instead want to go with how the deal makes them feel. its more than a little immature to accuse this of those who disagree with you. your model relies on the fact that this would all be additional tax revenue that wasn't collected earlier. While a lot of these jobs can be people who already work in NY and simply switch jobs. In addition, it neglects the cost…

its more than a little immature to accuse this of those who disagree with you

Indeed. Especially when those who are quick to accuse others of not doing the math themselves are not... really doing the math.

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