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Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

governor.ny.gov

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Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#71

Post by joshuamorton »

zaroth wrote: post #53
spamizbad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies in New York create jobs for the state. Some even more than Amazon, and generate even greater amounts tax revenue. Are they too entitled to tax relief? Amazon is a tremendously successful company. You start handing it tax breaks and you begin walking down the path of making it a government-sanctioned monopoly.

This is what detractors of the deal keep saying. You can speculate on the organic growth rate of the NY economy all you want. But at the end of the day, there are 25,000 - 40,000 jobs which definitely won’t be coming to Long Island City now.

That's not obviously true.

The land is still there. Other companies could use it. Unless everything Amazon might have purchased goes totally undeveloped, the impact is less than the 25k jobs.

And given the time horizons involved, I'd take that bet.

Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#72

Post by johncolanduoni »

spamizbad wrote: post #55
noahA wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the bulk of the taxes paid by Amazon be paid back? The article said that Amazon would get $3 billion in existing credits (i.e. not deal specific, just business tax credits) and would be paying ~$27 billion. Seems like a steal for NY.

Look at this beyond the scope of Amazon. If the basic premise here is that any company should get a tax break if they are capable of hiring enough workers whose tax payments would exceed their employer's tax payments, all you're doing is just shifting the tax burden onto the workers in the form of regressive income, sales, and property taxes.

For there to be an actual increase in tax revenue for the state via income tax, those workers would have to be receiving higher salaries than they would have otherwise, would they not? Or emigrating from somewhere else, which they would be unlikely to do if they are not receiving an increase in compensation.

Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#73

Post by jzwinck »

spamizbad wrote: post #55
noahA wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the bulk of the taxes paid by Amazon be paid back? The article said that Amazon would get $3 billion in existing credits (i.e. not deal specific, just business tax credits) and would be paying ~$27 billion. Seems like a steal for NY.

Look at this beyond the scope of Amazon. If the basic premise here is that any company should get a tax break if they are capable of hiring enough workers whose tax payments would exceed their employer's tax payments, all you're doing is just shifting the tax burden onto the workers in the form of regressive income, sales, and property taxes.

You assume there is no economy of scale for government spending. For example, building a road to serve 10 million people may be cheaper per capita than a road for 1 million people. Same on the revenue side: doing a single large deal for $27B is probably cheaper than doing a thousand deals for $27M.

Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#74

Post by blacksqr »

Permit wrote: post #31
spamizbad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad they dropped it. There are some grounded concerns: * Amazon is one of the most successful enterprises in human history and should not require support from taxpayers beyond their voluntary patronage of Amazon itself. * Most of these "deals" were put together secretly without input from the public. Millions (or in NY's case, billion+) of dollars were packaged and presented without community input or oversight…

> * Most of these "deals" were put together secretly without input from the public. Millions (or in NY's case, billion+) of dollars were packaged and presented without community input or oversight > * State and local governments probably shouldn't be diverting billions of their citizen's tax revenue to lure corporations who will only impact a tiny subset of their citizenry. I haven't been following this closely. What…

Yes, the letter asks us to believe that Amazon, after a lengthy nationwide search, ultimately chose a deal that only offered credits that were already on the books.

If the benefits of the deal are already available to all comers, why doesn't Amazon just continue with its plan?

Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#77

Post by johncolanduoni »

avar wrote: post #52

> "The RWDSU Union was interested in organizing the Whole Foods grocery store workers. [...]. Organizing Amazon, or Whole Foods workers, or any company for that matter, is better pursued by allowing them to locate here and then making an effort to unionize the workers, rather than making unionization a bar to entrance." I'm not familiar with how this works in New York. Someone who's registering a company needs to neg…

Perhaps they were looking for Amazon to guarantee they would only hire unionized workers (or X% unionized workers) for certain positions, as part of the deal?

Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#78

Post by rossjudson »

spamizbad wrote: post #23
smallgovt wrote: post #2

I think it's sad that the vocal minority was able to alter this decision. As the letter mentions, the project would have brought $27b in revenue to the state. This magnitude of revenue is material considering the fact that the state only collected $76b in taxes in the last reported fiscal year. I think there's reason to debate whether large corps should be able to hold an auction like this, but given the place we fin…

I'm glad they dropped it. There are some grounded concerns: * Amazon is one of the most successful enterprises in human history and should not require support from taxpayers beyond their voluntary patronage of Amazon itself. * Most of these "deals" were put together secretly without input from the public. Millions (or in NY's case, billion+) of dollars were packaged and presented without community input or oversight…

Interesting. None of your concerns have anything to do with New York. Each would apply anywhere Amazon would choose to build.

Re: Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

#79

Post by tptacek »

blacksqr wrote: post #76

"If New York only allows unionized companies to enter, our economy is unsustainable" Dear workers: you must remain poor and powerless forever, for the greater good.

Did you miss the surrounding context? His point is that NY has very strong worker protections, and that it's much better to let a non-unionized company set up in NY and then organize it, rather than trying to make organization a condition to entry.
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