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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

If they are adding people to your community- what roads will these new people be driving on? What schools will their children be attending?

The additional revenue is not being added in a vacuum.

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The new people will be paying sales taxes, property taxes and state income taxes.

Though usually not enough to make up the difference in incentives. If we take the Amazon NY incentives at face value, each employee needs to pay $25k in taxes to make up the difference just on the initial tax break alone. That doesn’t count extra expenditures for expanded public transportation or nearby development. That’s also if amazon hires the proposed 40k new employees on day one, which they won’t.

There’s a good argument to be made that spending that money elsewhere would provide better outcomes and on shorter timelines than giving one of the largest companies in the world a tax break.

Which given FANG salaries they will do.

And the state and NYC preying in aid the problems with its tube system is deeply cynical, maybe try to be 1 less corrupt and competent

$25k in state and local taxes would be high even for FANG in NYC

They'll pay that in income taxes alone in 2 years.

Probably not; 2 years is overly optimistic. See my reply above.

The highest marginal tax rate in NYC is 3.65%. The effective rate on a $140,000 salary is about 2.6%. Leaving a local tax liability of about $3500.

On the same income, NY state has a marginal rate of 6.45% and an effective rate of about 4.3%, for a liability of $6,000.

So, in year one, that's a bit over $9000 in revenue from a highly compensated employee. If the $25k figure stated above it true and a one-time incentive, it takes 2.5-3 years to pay off. Employees earning less than $140k will take 3+ years to pay off. If the incentives are recurring in any way, then the payoff is pushed out even more.

But, as mentioned, the employee doesn't just have to "pay back" the initial incentive, she has to produce tax revenue to pay for increased services and infrastructure demand, pushing the timeline out even further.

Anyway, the NYC deal doesn't sound to bad. Even at a 5-8 year pay-off, if the positions are relatively long-lived, it's a long-term positive. But, when we consider the Foxconn deal in the Mid-West, ouch, that one's going to sting the local community for a long time.

The deal requires an average wage of $150,000. [1] And with the nature of variance in salaries combined with progressive taxation works out even better for the state; one $100K and one $200K employee will result in more revenue than two $150K employees.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5096409-New-York-Agr...

More citizens mean more cost for the state, aka the thing taxes are supposedly collected for. Amateur here, so I might just missed it, but where did you account for those marginal cost?

I have a hard time believing original residents actually benefit that greatly from those deals as well. Yes there are benefits of getting more people and well paying jobs into the region and some competition to keep taxes reasonable seem fine. But to me this still mostly seems like a transfer of wealth and power to big cooperation, boosting societal problems we already have a hard time dealing with.

The 4th paragraph.

Pertinent to the headline of this article: Texas has no state income tax.

They also cost a great deal in required infrastructure, drive up competition for affordable housing, and create complications in other ways. Texas has no income tax so there's no revenue from that. The city will end up net negative from most corporate incentives.

Aren't roads funded from gas tax?

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

> Aren't roads funded from gas tax?

No. Not much at all. Highways, once upon a time, mostly. Local roads not really ever. https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/do-roads-pay-themselves

How roads are funded depends on the State and locale. In some States, all highways are funded solely by use (gas and car) taxes as a constitutional requirement. Local roads, on the other hand, are funded almost arbitrarily -- it does include a gas tax in many places but in many places it does not.

Texas has a"Robin hood" school finance system, where districts with high property values are subject to recapture, where they send a large percentage of the property taxes collected to the state to be used for districts in less wealthy areas. If memory serves, Austin ISD sends almost half of its billion dollar budget back to the state.

$670 million this year. Due to our our exploding home values and decling enrollment.

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