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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Amazon and those workers will still consume city services. City's don't make a profit on average, so while those workers may make above average wages it's unlikely to make up for the overall lost revenue.

Picturing 1000's of workers is overblown. Amazon does employ a lot of people, but in a highly distributed fashion and their expansion is not going to be huge. On top of that these are all large city's where +/- a few thousand workers is not that big a deal.

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If +/- a few thousand workers isn't a big deal then why is it being made a big deal by all these comments? Obviously it's going to make an impact. My point is that the corporation and workers and associated economic multipliers will be adding a net positive to city revenue. If it wasn't going to do that I doubt hundreds of cities would be competing for it.

Direct employment numbers are direct revenues are easily, concretely associated with the deal, indirect infrastructure impacts are less in peoples minds, harder to concretely attribute and easier to cloud, and take a longer time to be palpable. Politicians overweight the former kind of measured (because they have more effect on political careers) and devalue the latter (for the opposite reason.)

Cities aren't actors, they are just abstractions; politicians are the actors pursuing Amazon.

> Amazon and those workers will still consume city services. City's don't make a profit on average

I'd be very surprised if an Amazon worker making, say, $160k consumes more in government services than the sales/property/income taxes they are paying.

Amazon workers in Philly aren't going to make 160k. Tech salaries are much lower here than on the west coast, much lower than NY and Boston as well.

The RFP quotes up to 50,0000 employees in 15 years. Any sane incentive package should have hooks in it to make sure most of those jobs do materialize.

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