Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

It is possible that the bribe-for-tax-breaks exchange actually provides benefit for the community, but that's not necessary for the transaction to take place.

This acts as a check on just how much of a tax break a municipality is able to give them, as public funds are needed to support that infrastructure. Austin, Seattle and Culver City seem to be striking the right balance.

It's not mindblowingly tremendous, but not a catastrophe either.

And schools are almost entirely paid by the local property taxes, at least in the communities where most of Apple employees will live.

From a city's perspective, why should companies of vastly different sizes, impacts, and expected lifetimes have the same leverage in terms of negotiating tax benefits today? Companies are getting the same "deal" in the sense that they will be eligible for these benefits when they bring enough to the table to make a city desperately want them.

I'm not saying it's just, but creating the "same deal" for all companies is only likely to occur if it's federally enforced - otherwise there will always be cities willing to offer these incentives.

Apple could have built new facilities literally anywhere they wanted. So should the international government pass a law against the US having lower taxes than France? The only people that should have a say in the tax rate of a place are the people paying the tax rate of a place.

Denver never had it in the first place. Money not earned isn’t the same as an actual cost. The people of Denver are in exactly the same shoes they were yesterday; they aren’t worse off.

And why should the federal government tell individual cities how they should tax? I’m afraid you don’t understand what federalism is, nor freedom for that matter. If a hypothetical Austin wants to give Bezos the key to the city what business is it to the people of Boise? Boise didn’t lose anything.

How does corporate bargaining power work? Suppose two states and one corporation operating in both states. The corporation says to each state, "I'm reducing the employee count in your state unless you reduce my taxes." The threat is credible and is in neither state's interest. Unless the two states talk to each other and both agree to not reduce the tax rate, a social guarantee is in jeopardy. A union or cooperation of the states disallows the corporation the ability to punish and reward individual states, reducing the means to manipulate each individual state's tax rate to the corporations liking.

> A normal way for governments to raise revenue in the United States is with property taxes. If you build a gigantic new office tower somewhere, then you are going to owe a lot of property taxes to the local government.

> So if you’re smart and have good lobbyists, you’ll say, “Hey, we were thinking of building a huge office tower in your city, but your taxes are so high. Maybe instead of paying the 8 percent property tax rate that’s on the books, we could pay 2 percent instead for the first 20 years.”

> The city may well agree to this proposal because 2 percent of a giant office tower is still a lot more than 8 percent of a parking lot. What’s more, bringing your office tower to town is going to generate a lot of sales tax and income tax revenue while probably helping to bolster property values across the board. So while reporters are going to write, accurately, that your company got millions of dollars in tax breaks in order to build your office tower, the city still ends up with more tax revenue than it would have had if you hadn’t come to town.

> So you can’t really say things like, “Instead of handing out millions in subsidies to Jeff Bezos, we should invest in the subway.” The subway doesn’t need a tax break; the subway needs actual money. And the tax breaks don’t represent money in hand that could be spent.

> What we want is a healthy form of competition where companies try to locate in cities that provide a high quality of public services relative to their tax revenue, so that cities have an incentive to try to govern themselves well. The current dynamic not only allocates too much surplus to rich companies, it undermines that healthy form of competition. Amazon doesn’t need to care whether New York City has cost-effective government or not; it just opts out of paying the costs.

> But the very fact that mayors are inclined to hand out these subsidies should teach them a lesson about tax policy.

(The lesson being that, if giving these tax breaks out is beneficial, maybe you should have been taxing something else in the first place.)

The companies were squeezing all of the benefits from having the company be there out of the city.

It took decades for some cities to wise up and realize that having a sports franchise wasn’t worth all of the incentives they give the leagues.

Here, you're essentially bringing in a whole bunch of new burden on infrastructure, but getting proportionally less back in order to support it (waiting on some inflection based on future sales tax or property taxes etc is not a guarantee, especially as campuses can be out in the sticks so drawing workers from a wider area). Either you take hits on that, or pass the extra needed cost onto other taxpayers.

I'm not sure whether or not the net is positive or negative, but the second order effects do need to be paid for somehow.

But that in itself is a zoning problem. Mixed development that allows the places people want to go to be integrated where people live drastically reduce transportation trips.