"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.
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...
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.