As an ex-small business owner I would much prefer if little companies got more incentives.
Politicians see the chance for tens of thousands of high paying jobs to be a net positive for their city -> politicians compete to bring said jobs to their city. I don’t understand why this is so controversial. Even absent Amazon’s explicit RFP process, which was a bit tacky, you were always going to have cities falling all over themselves trying to gain Amazon’s favor. It’s no different than if you were buying a car and trying to play multiple dealers off each other, just on a larger scale. To think that NYC and DC don’t have to compete to attract business is naive.
On the non business side our tax dollars are going to support billionaires. At the national level this is pretty close to zero sum. Every dollar Amazon doesn’t pay is a dollar someone else has to. Discrepancies between regions would be solved more efficiently with transfer/equalization payments.
So why should they get so much as 1 cent to help with that?
It's an awful broken system and the politicians who enable it should be tossed out of office.
Corruption has become so ingrained in the state that it has become part of the official duties of the state.
Part of what's so ridiculous about all this is if you picked 2 places for Amazon to go then NYC and DC would be right near the top. They want government money, they want access to talent. Obvious choices. If neither city gave them a cent they would still end up there.