Imo people are mostly good. They want to be good. I saw something about an Army program to have soldiers teaching very impoverished kids in the poorest countries or something like that and that the programs were determined not to be especially good at what they aim to do, or help the military do its mission because of the good will it generated. At least that's what the military thought. But, they decided to keep doing it because it was good for the morale of the American soldiers. Or, you do the Stanford Prison experiment, or the Milgram electro-shock experiments, or you build Abu-Ghraib prison and people do horrible things and sometimes smile and take pictures while they do it.

You put together giant impersonal organizations and reward people for the bottom line and/or protecting their ass and you christen it with fiduciary duty, and you get the kinds of evil that corporations do.

That may not be exactly the same thing as "inherent", but it's close and maybe it is exactly the same.

I think Elizabeth Warren has talked a bit about this, but I think we could really benefit from some changes in corporate governance/law and at least some of the things they do in Germany (like workers electing a big part of the board) would be good.

Would someone get money back or a credit for a losing year? Otherwise they could have an up year, go back to even the next and end up with a net loss.

I wonder why the dullards brainlessly writing Econ 101 explanations of how this is a missed opportunity aren't responding to my repeated citations of Foxconn and Tesla going back on their words and coming nowhere close to their promised jobs numbers while inhaling the EZ cash in the last year.

Maybe they're waiting for me to file a corporate tax return before they turn me off ignore.

Because this time it's different, obviously.

being a dishonest scumbag on the internet to pwn the libs

So it actually costs NYS and NYC nothing because the 3 billion dollars is created out of thin ****ing air?

Holy **** we just solved the national debt. Do this 20 trillion / 3 billion times and we're back, baby!

Bezos will basically keep it all but most of his employees won't.

Before anyone starts getting pissy, let's take a breath and listen to this Citations Needed episode from last year on "lotteryism" (there's a sequel focused on sports deals where Gregg Popovich gets a mention): https://soundcloud.com/citationsneed...ng-the-picture

I must say, the last few pages have been truly inspiring, to witness neolibs having a strong start out the gate and then just getting dumped on mercilessly. These pages are the single strongest indication yet of AOC's influence.

By ALL means, please lobby NY politicians to spend billions on infrastructure jobs!!!

(Not sure what that has to do with giving a massive ****ty corporation a handout?)

Yes, PLEASE also lobby for a NY public bank and investment firm! You are on the right track!

lol'ed

great post

do u even Citations Needed bro? we've all known about this for like a year bc we listened to the pod

$100-200m in taxes

$3 billion in subsidy

how does that prove your point?

That is a subsidy worth 15-30 years of income taxes.

WTF

1. They aren't paying the 3 billion out right away. It's like 500m for the building and most of the rest is actually standard package offered to other businesses.
2. NYC borrows at ~3.3%. That makes even 100 million almost indefinitely to be about 3 billion in PV. More to the point, NYC would have nobody to collect (most of) that 3 billion from in the absence of Amazon. NYC isn't giving AMZN cash, just tax abatements.
3. As I've pointed out 100m a year is very conservative and not even accounting for other positive externalities (of which there are plenty unique to the AMZN/NYC combo).

It's incredible to me that liberals are so anti-Amazon HQ2, which provides some of the most accessible IT work around and will keep some of that free college tuition in the state. As it is, as I said before, newly minted engineers basically are looking at Wall Street or move. I could understand a lot better if it were another warehouse where the jobs would be temporary and replaced by robots within 10 years but the HQ2 is about real white collar jobs hiring piles of lawyers, engineers, accountants, marketers, and other professionals. A lot of those jobs would target schools (the CUNYs for example) that have a lot of residents from NYC families of limited means.

It's really hard to overstate how important the AMZN HQ2 would have been to NYC. The city already has sunk billions into trying to get tech startups going in NYC with very limited success and having seen a lot of that money being soaked up by "fashion" companies masquerading as tech startups over the last 10 years or so. AMZN as an anchor tech company that provides a steady flow of well-trained tech professionals and entrepreneurs to the area would have finally given the city a realistic chance of getting a piece of the tech startup pie.

Giving all of that up is just incredibly stupid.

I honestly wouldn't care too much if it were just another Citi tower housing backoffice employees which the bank is actively trying to phase out.*

*every major bank is actively outsourcing as much backoffice work as humanly possible to India... accounting firms too. There has been some backlash recently but they are slowly figuring out what can be safely outsourced and still maintain a high level of service and quick response time. This isn't all bad... this has actually meant more space for the more lucrative front office jobs that have bigger requirements on face time and knowledge.

City to city, sadly, that may actually be the answer when it comes to big employers like AMZN. To be entirely frank, I think small businesses that don't have the ability to "pull" in employees just can't credibly threaten to move because they'll startup where the business and talent pools are. Therefore, smaller businesses/startups have no leverage and are taxable. That's why tech startups are in SF/Silicon Valley/Seattle and medical startups around Boston. They'd pay very little (if any) tax anyway to start off. In many ways, the city is basically investing in startups banking on future tax revenue. I likewise would make the same claim that financial institutions and large law firms can't make a credible threat to move out of NYC due to the concentration of legal/financial talent/business/infrastructure in NYC and I would not support subsidies (except maybe token stuff just to keep backoffice stuff around for a few extra years) to them.

Like I said before, It's stupid that cities have no means/leverage to extract more of the gains for the public and corporations (especially large/high profile ones like AMZN and worse, sports teams) get to too much of the positive externalities. I acknowledge that's an absurd result and it's basically a prisoner's dilemma problem. I'd be HAPPY if we could craft a federal law that basically prevents states and cities from racing to the bottom to attract big employers. It would essentially be a cartel agreeing to some minimum price (tax rate) on employers.

But, under status quo, as a selfish New Yorker, I think it's absurdly stupid to turn AMZN away over $3 billion.

wait



ok i'm there

Grizy, we've already seen what Amazon has done for Seattle. It's slightly better than Schultz moving the Sonics.

Amazon is still free to put their business in NYC. They just won't be subsidized to do so.

It's not a prisoner's dilemma because what the State does, doesn't matter at all
Missouri gave Kroenke hundreds of millions! He still moved the Rams and they're still paying for it!

Robbed open eyed more like.

PFI was always obviously exactly what it is. A corporate form of wads of cash up front, repayment free period and then a pile of ruinously expensive debt.

All so the debt (which could have been very cheap) was kept off the books

Imagine if AOC started a trend where cities stopped giving subsidies and tax breaks to companies that don’t need them. **** Bezos!

I saw aoc arguing that the 3B can be used on other things as if the 3B was lying around in a bank account waiting to handed over to Amazon. Face palm. She knows that its not true but politically it sounds like a winning counter argument. The 3B abatement only exists if Amazon brings to the table 25000 jobs and invests billions in cash to build a campus. Oh look an actual exchange.

Now i have posters here believing the 3B is a check waiting to be written to amazon.

Explaining how tax incentives work in this forum is like explaining a concept they have never heard of before.

Tax incentives? WHO DOES THAT? What is this? Does it bite?

Every single government state and national uses forms of tax incentives and abatements to lure the kinds of businesses they want small and large. Theres nothing controversial about what they offered Amazon.

And grizy is just spot on with his posts in this thread.

What do posters here think about the government giving tax incentives (expired though) to buy Tesla cars? Was this good or bad that the government was trying to push environmentally friendly cars?

The whole Amazon HQ2 search was a scam for Amazon to get free data analytics from every major metropolitan area in North America. The fact that they just pulled out of this with no plans to put those 25k “needed” jobs somewhere else just proves it.

What do you mean by "tax incentives"? What is that? I've never heard of it. Can you explain how that works please?

I’m not against Amazon HQ2 in NY at all, I think it would have been a net positive. That said, the fact that they are pulling out after some politicians said mean words to them makes it clear to me that the whole thing was a scam to get free data analytics and they were looking for an out anyway.

jman, that's an interesting/slightly hot take I haven't heard before but actually makes a lot of sense. Anything to support it or you just speculating?

Not being critical, just genuinely interested.

Yeah this entire search really rubs me the wrong way. If they had used it to find a mid sized city and turn it into a company town it would have been one thing... but when they made everyone grovel and then gave it to DC and NYC at the end it made it all feel like a sham. If you're going to allow the obvious candidates in the running why do an extensive search of cities that can't hope to compete with the large intangibles the obvious candidates all have?

The answer? I hadn't thought of the data analytics and that's a good take. My take was that they did it to scam NYC into giving them 5B in tax incentives lol. NYC could use Amazon, but NYC doesn't need to give tax incentives to anyone ever basically. That city needs every dollar it can find to fix its infrastructure, and that area is going to gentrify with dense high tax base buildings one way or another. Absolutely no good reason to give anyone a dime no matter how big the name. People come to NYC because it's NYC. If they don't see the value in that they should take their business elsewhere.

These realities are why New Yorkers were completely fine with Amazon not coming. NYC needs to focus on keeping what it has. Consolidation is generally very underrated vs growth, but without fixing some of the long term problems keeping what they have is pretty unlikely.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for companies to add HQ’s in cities like Lincoln, Pierre, Helena, Jackson. Cities that really need the help. It helps property values increase in a city that needs it and helps property value decrease in a city where that is needed. Not every company needs to be in SF, Boston or NYC.

The government gives you a big tax credit when you buy a Tesla. The credit still exists, it just stepped down by some amount at the end of 2018.