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Quote of the Day: "The seventy percent of New Yorkers who supported Amazon and now vent their anger also bear responsibility and must learn that the silent majority should not be silent because they can lose to the vocal minority and self-interested politicians."
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.
Lose-lose.
PS: That said, I'd be scared of how that would affect NYC traffic patterns if plans would go forward.
Quote of the Day: "The seventy percent of New Yorkers who supported Amazon and now vent their anger also bear responsibility and must learn that the silent majority should not be silent because they can lose to the vocal minority and self-interested politicians."
I'm glad we're waking up to this fact. It's not enough to hold a belief... in our system, action is required. I think this is why young people are so frequently screwed by political decisions and policy - we are, uncoincidentally, the age group that votes least often.
The fact that our system was corrupted to the point of requiring it is not a point to elate! it is a point to contempt.
> the age group that votes least often.
That's a very disingenuous argument that you yourself refuted in the first paragraph...If it doesn't matter only voting, does voting alone matters? At which point is political participation enough participation? voting, attending every single local and federal meeting? at which point will it suffice? Should everyone drop their profession and become professional politicians just to have a modicum of voice in the system?
As long as we allow absurd amounts of money in politics, nobody will have a voice. no matter how much you vote or post online.
When you are filling your taxes, after writing the "owned amount" in box 22 or your 1040, say it out loud "it is OK i am paying 40% of my income, because amazon deserves to pay zero since they did participate in politics, unlike me".
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…
The $27B is a present value sum of future cash flows, not an annual revenue.
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…
> 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 fairness, and b) maximizing revenue for your constituents. The two goals are not always aligned.
If you care more about fairness, then sure, the tax law is the tax law and you should hold the line no matter what. Personally I'd rather maximize revenue, especially here where the knock effects on the economy were pro-growth.
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…
What's wrong with giving Amazon billion dollar for building an office? Just to put it in perspective, lets say they would create 30000 jobs with average pay of $80000/year. That is $2.4 billion in just salaries over single year. According to random tax calculator I found online it is about 0.7 billions in taxes every year. This is crazy ROI. If I could put money which would have 70% safe yearly return that would be i…
I'm not saying having HQ2 there would have no positive effects, it'd have absolutely contributed to the growth of the tech scene. But it'd have probably accelerated the arrival of other problems, which is something the city might not be ready to tackle.
San Francisco-ization it seems. Liberals going against their own interests. Reminds me of an apartment complex under construction in SF that was forced to include a larger amount of low-income units. The builders found it would no longer be profitable, and ceased building. So lose-lose, prisoner's dilemma, vocal social media forces "won," lacking the cooperative biases that humans normally have. They all end up with…
"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.
Some people are still able to distinguish reality from a sales pitch.