The thing is, those tax cuts are largely offset by income taxes that those employees bring in, along with all of the $ that having a huge corporation like Amazon would bring into the area. It's not corruption, it's business.
Those tax cuts should be added ON TOP of the income taxes those employees bring in.
More business should be more tax revenue = better services for the citizens.
>It's not corruption, it's business.
When a business is able to make a deal that gets them out of paying taxes they otherwise would legally be required to pay, that's corruption. Sugar coat it all you want, it's regular citizens they are stealing from.
The choice is between those things because Amazon says so, and government chooses not to stand up to them by refusing to cooperate country-wide, or passing federal legislation.
Amazon is not an outlier here: this is how all deals of this size in the United States get done. It's a national embarrassment.
It doesn't have to be that way, and it isn't in many other countries.
Taxes are not a force of nature...
If you were to effectively prohibit all states from giving tax incentives to get companies to make their HQ there, you will fail in 2 important ways. The first one is that there will always be a way to bargain company-state-city wide. So even though the tax burden might be the same, the company could order for , for example,special infrastructure or whatever, to get extra value. And because the city wants to do it, its most likely going to. This result is worse than a tax break.
The other failure will come if you could, somehow, prohibit any thing like the one above from happening. That means that of 2 cities with similar demographics, where one of them has some sort of disadvantage, will be forever barred from having big companies set up shop. Why? Because if there is no tax incentive, the companies will only go to the best option available. If you happen to be that city, you would hit the jackpot. The rest, however...
"Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount"
Read their RFP for more.
Businesses don't want to be victims of their own success, where immediately after they plunk the money down for buildout and development they're reassessed at the value they themselves added.
You're completely wrong. Amazon WILL build HQ2. This is a zero sum game from citizens/cities perspective. No city in the US should offer such taxcut, and then, surprisingly, this money is spent by amazon on taxes and effectively given to the citizens in one of the cities.
If you allow this, you put in place scenario I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15193611
May be somewhere in India, where its cheaper for them to operate from.
Also given places like India want to attract investments, they will be more than happy to offer not only subsidies, but also provide free land and other perks like tax breaks and free electricity.
This might feel like blackmail. But that is what capitalism is all about. Companies do what is profitable for them.
Lol.
"When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."
--Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
So when amazon finds a way to lower its tax burden, either investors, employees or consumers, and most likely all of them,which are citizens, pay less taxes.
Taxes are not a means to reduce profits, if that were to be your desired result.
It's for sure simple mistake they specifically asks to calculate all this intangible things and reduce it to money amount they gets from citi.
So how about..... NO!
Quote from RFP: "Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount"