Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Google buys entire city blocks and nobody bats an eye. Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition.
More publicity = more scrutiny = more angry opponents of your business decision
That type of payday might be worth a bit of scrutiny.
That's not peanuts.
Also, if your problem is large tax breaks for corporations, the focus should be on those programs that make available the other $2.5B available, since any corporation with a similar scale project could get that. Focusing specifically on Amazon distracts from the existence of these programs and whether that existence is a good idea.
As an aside, your snarky tone detracts from your comment and hurts the discourse.
Unless it's for a football stadium.
(Granted, Newark is in NJ... and the proposed tax deal was from NY. Thinking as adjacent states instead of a region bites.)
You haven't seen the perpetual and energetic fights in my part of the nation about public funding for football (and other professional sports) stadiums. Sports businesses trying to get tax money to be spent in order to enhance their profitability is absolutely something that brings out the opposition.
So Las Vegas gave them a lot of money.
Football stadiums get subsidized because football is extraordinarily, wildly popular with most of the people that pay taxes. Those taxpayers spend massive sums of money on sports every year, across the NFL / MLB / NBA / NHL / MLS / NCAA. Those people pay most of the taxes that fund the government that then pays for the stadium subsidies.
Taxpayers love sports, love spending money on sports, and the majority of taxpayers are clearly fine with subsidizing sports at all levels. They vote with their dollars and... votes, over and over again, year after year, decade after decade, to keep supporting sports subsidization.
See: football attendance and ticket spending on NFL and college games annually, as well as sports packages for television, merchandise sales, etc.
Sports are very popular, and stadium-lovers are vocal with their representatives.
But they are an outspoken minority. The majority of tax-payers do not support subsidizing stadiums.
And stadiums will get built regardless of whether the city gives them free money, because they're profitable. So why subsidize private profits from public coffers?
Stop Padding Billionaires’ Profits by Paying for Sports Stadiums
https://ritholtz.com/2018/07/stop-padding-billionaires-profi...
So it's absolutely an expansion of a similar scope.
In short, yes, they would have signed a contract stating that.
Also, the pull-out letter also basically dumps the blame on state/local officials for not wanting Amazon, despite not all stakeholders being present at the table when discussions started.
As is common with other, bigger ego, basketball players
Obviously NBA rules relate to tampering would come into play, but it would be a compelling story for the 24 hour sports new cycle.
I've read about athletes at least considering the income tax of a state in their decision, but I'm not sure it's ever been a deciding factor.
Getting reelected will be an issue.
First, state income tax is exactly that, income tax imposed by the state, and governed by the state. There may be local jurisdictions that impose additional income tax but any savings there would be trivial.
While sports are important to the local economy, my understanding is that they are relatively minor at the state level.
Second, LeBron (and other athletes) earn playing income in every jurisdiction they play in, not based solely on the jurisdiction that the team is based in.
This means they are responsible for filing taxes in each of these jurisdiction.
In addition to playing income, they make money through endorsements and other investments. These are considered income in whatever state they claim is their residence.
It's in a players interest to establish a residence in an area with favorable tax laws.
Cities may try to woo elite players to join them, but tax savings isn't very compelling.
Do you have a citation for this? I'm skeptical. I live and work in Texas. When I travel to my company's office in NJ, effectively earning income for a week in that state, I don't pay NJ income tax on that income.
Edit to add: According to my interpretation of this: https://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/pdf/current/1040nr...
Assuming your income is over $20,000, you ARE required to file a NJ state tax return.
Also, note that even if you don't file a tax return, doesn't mean you are exempted from doing so.
Example, as a citizen of Texas, you are also required to pay use tax on any items aquired out of state/country and used in the state. My assumption is that you don't also pay that either, even thought you are legally required to do so. It turns out that use Tax is particularly difficult to audit and collect for, especially without a mandatory return like state income tax.
Uh, state income taxes can approach 10%. This is not “trivial”.
The original proposal was that star athletes attempt to negotiate tax incentives with cities, in the same vein Amazon did with NYC (and many other large corporations do).
City income taxes add a trivial percent to the total income tax rate when compared to the state income tax level. Thus, if you got incentives from a city, they would amount to trivial amount of savings.
Athletes would need to negotiate at the state level in order to have a material effect on their taxes.
I hope that clarifies my point.
I imagine Athletes pay accountants who are well versed in how to fill out those forms, and, at least in the NFL's case, a lot of players compensation may be in bonuses, and not necessarily game-day checks (which would be subject to local jurisdictional income laws).
That’s pretty funny how well settled that area of Law is, and yet again Amazon thinks it’s pretty special in that regard also...historically they haven’t paid those taxes either (state or local) and there was just a Supreme Court case confirming that in fact amazon isn’t special and that all this time they themselves should have been paying taxes where they had been selling/shipping goods.
That’s cute, but not the way the Law works generally. Maybe you can point to a single state where the law is different, until then I’ll just say the general rule is if the merchant makes of $x they are required by law to collect sales tax. Where or not the merchant does, they will be liable to the state for payment of the same, not the individual consumers.
If the law worked the way you represent why would any merchant collect and pay sales tax to the states?
https://www.open990.com/org/020716277/the-lebron-james-famil...
I'm a nonprofit fundraising professional, and I could probably talk about all the reasons why that is a horrible idea for 2-3 hours straight without repeating myself. I mean, at the very least, it's a bad idea for the same reason that exposing all the financials of every individual, or all other organizations, with the added benefit that you'd be opening people up to harassment for supporting certain social causes or belonging to certain religious groups. You might as well start a government mailing list called "hate crime targets."
If you think there are a lot of non-charitable transactions occurring using charities as a front, it would be a way better idea to just have the IRS audit more 501c3 orgs.
If you are trying to decrease fraud, it would almost certainly make more sense to audit wealthy individuals and for-profit corporations far more often.
There is information in people's finances that should be 100% private. What if an employer looks at the financials of someone applying for a job and sees they claimed $100k in medical expenses last year because they had cancer? Companies will do that if they have the ability, and people will lose jobs because of it.
It doesn't matter if you make it illegal. I worked a recruiting agency for a while, and illegal hiring practices are incredibly common.
A good portion of all of that is stuff Amazon could compile, but they got cities across the country to donate probably tens of thousands of hours of taxpayer salaries to do it instead.
The nature of special incentives each proposal offered - custom ones for Amazon-only, or unusual ones - will also have told them which cities they've got extra leverage over if they come offering a smaller project like a distribution center.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/11/the-extreme-amazon-bidd...
> The most jarring incentive reportedly comes out of Chicago, which, under state law, could redirect between 50 and 100 percent of the income taxes incurred by Amazon employees right back to Amazon.
Basically the state law allows employers who create new jobs to not have to pay their portion of the employment tax for a few years, and that tax credit applies to every company.
I'm pretty happy with the way Illinois and Chicago played their cards with Amazon, we were basically like "We've got a lot of great shit, and if you come here you can take advantage of this tax credit." We didn't offer Amazon any special treatment.
Stealing the worker's surplus labor value isn't enough?
A big difference is that contrived drama is at the very core of the entertainment business of professional sports. It makes for much of the entertainment! It's less helpful in the more mundane enterprise of 'building a bunch of offices and warehouses'.
People in Long Island City calling their political representatives and yelling at them about how they don't want your offices and warehouses is not business well done if you have 'building warehouses and offices' as a goal.
1. Basketball is entertainment, and 'The Decision' was the result of years of speculation by the fans and the media. Furthermore you see similar spectacles for such things as National Signing Day, where top recruits hold press conferences to announce what college they are attending.
2. There is animosity and jealousy towards 'entitled millionaire athletes' that was made worse with players being able to control their own destiny instead of suffering under terrible management. "If they get to choose where to work and do so with their friends, why can't I" yells Joe Six-Pack.
3. The super team. Somehow NBA fans forgot or were ignorant of how absolutely stacked championship teams had been throughout history, featuring multiple hall of fame players and coaches. Elements of #2 play into this as well where it is management, not players, that should build championship teams.
4. A player like LBJ is far, far more likely to deliver (which he did with multiple championships) in the NBA than a company like Amazon is to deliver a value worth the taxpayer dollars they absorb.
#YCFundMeToo
YC Fund "Me Too" -- I think you might want to let PR and HR take a look at this before you move forward with this name.
Honestly, why is this so hard when so much of the rest of the developed world manages to do it so well?
I am not advocating for big businesses evading tax mind you. Just suggesting it would probably still be a boon for the state tax income if a bunch of tech wages migrated to the NY tax base.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials
New Yorkers already pay tremendous tax dollars yet we have the mass transit that we do. The idea that there are no tax dollars is a myth. The funds are simply siphoned off to some other who-knows-what, and the remaining is poorly spent. The purported Amazon tax base would have likely been spent the same.
If Amazon wanted a strong transportation system they could have demanded some of their tax break went towards that. They did not.
NYC is already the second largest tech hub in the nation, as well as a global leader in a wide variety of industries.
If anything, Amazon moving in, and this I doubt, would have made it less affordable than it already was to live here.
NYC population is 08.6M
NYS population is 19.85M
Just the city is forty percent of the population. If you add the surrounding areas, you'll be a majority (I think they'd want things done in the city). How does the city not have better representation in the state assembly? How does upstate keep getting away with swindling the city?
As James Damore recently tweeted: "Amazon abuses its near-monopoly to bankrupt its competitors by selling at a loss, threaten brands with counterfeits until they sell on Amazon, and use third-party merchants’ data to undercut them. All while being subsidized billions by the government." https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1094985319575969792
IRRATIONAL left. This investment on the part of Amazon gave way way way more to the city than it got back in subsidies.
It's kind of ridiculous. If I were Amazon, I would drop NYC in a heartbeat if they didn't appreciate that degree of investment.
The subsidies were 1.525 billion. Amazon's investment was expected to be around 2.5 billion. Only an irrational fool cannot do that math.
It would generate property tax (if not abated) and income tax for the workers (both hired after the fact, and hired to complete the construction), but at what percentage of the total investment? 10-20%?
What is the long term effect of having government hand out money to every business that creates a hype? What is the effect of the amount of similar deals that will inevitably get hyped?
Should you play the game at all? Is it reasonable for someone to come along with this kind of deal? Is there no sense of fair play - that all corporations should be treated equally - whose logic is outside of the simple arithmetic?
The simple arithmetic that you are suggesting can potentially lead to unpleasant situations. What if the opposite were to happen? Supposed some big firm like Google decided to ask the government for money, or else they leave and sack every employee who doesn't want to go to their new location?
You could have firms queueing up to present you with new math problems.
Unless you're Elon, then it's celebrated.
The opposition is because of the Massive tax breaks and other $$$ giveaways New York was going to hand over to Amazon. I don't recall Google extorting NYC for $$$ before they decided to expand....
If you're implying that Google got tax breaks, and no one noticed the public data confirming these tax breaks, please provide evidence of the data that has been overlooked.
Show me the public data source where I could conceivably find that out and I'll do "please provide evidence of the data that has been overlooked". Because I don't think that data source exists.
I don't think you realize how opaque tax records are in many places. You seem to be implying that there is a way for the public - or even journalists - to acquire the tax and assessment information of individual companies. Attempting to do so is considered fraud in most jurisdictions (e.g. attempting to use a FOIA request for the personal information - including tax records - of someone else or a business of which you are not an officer).
You are saying if I bought a piece of property and paid property taxes on it, that all of my business taxes would suddenly show up in the property tax records?
Here's an article discussing the topic at large[0] (and Google is one of the beneficiaries here).
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/02/us-cities-and...
Yes, this is common. But just because it's common doesn't mean it's right or should be allowed.
It's not like NYC is paying Amazon to come to NYC. NYC would still make huge tax revenues from additional sales, real estate, income taxes, and corporate taxes.
Now they're turning that all away. It's such an irrational decision that if I were Amazon, it would raise a big red flag for me as well.
No need to open in a community that doesn't want your money.
NYC was basically offering the same thing to Amazon: "hey come live in our city, we will give you a temporary tax reduction, in exchange for a TON of money over the next X years".
Overall the city wouldn't have lost money, it would have gained many billions of dollars of additional money in the future in exchange for an initial 2 billion reduction.
[1] https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/business/technology/430953... (The estimated recoup time is 25 years, which means the plant will be obsolete before the state sees a dime of net revenue.)
A 5 second Google search shows hundreds of results for 1 month free rent in apartment listings.
What exactly are you contributing to the discussion?
I believe OP is right that the month's free rent offered on an apartment is recouped by the landlord: in the form higher rents, which have become a real problem for many people born and raised in the city and which would likely only be exacerbated by Amazon's setting up shop here, especially under the conditions offered by the city.
Over the past 20 years New York has experienced an influx of wealth without commensurate investment in public services. The MTA is dying, urban blight is spreading and many of the new professional class moving here don't seem bothered by it.
Another piece of "anecdata": walking down Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg a few years back, I heard one wealthy newcomer say to another that she couldn't wait for the local pharmacy across the street from the new Duane Reade to close. Maybe this anecdote doesn't have the force of a "real data" but it may help some people on here understand why New Yorkers aren't thrilled by the prospect of a building a big Amazon campus and welcoming them with a handout.
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-ci... Unlike the author of this article, I'm not averse to my city changing, but I'd like to imagine something other than the change we've been seeing...
I'm not gonna lie, I'm part of the gentrification problem over the last five years, but to be fair New York gentrified me at the same time that I helped gentrify the neighborhood. I only made about 30k a year before I moved to New York and I lived in a trailer home back then. After moving to New York I got a few different tech jobs and now I live in one of those over-priced one month free buildings.
I share my story just to say that in my perspective gentrification is a complicated system, and like you I also have a personal stake in all this. In my experience working in tech in New York has been a huge opportunity to improve my life. Amazon would have offered roughly another 25k people such an opportunity, some of them would have been newcomers, and some hopefully long term NYC residents. I can't lie, some people might not have benefited as much as others, but at least those 25k would have been able to get the same opportunity I did when I moved here.
You should also recognize that many people would be actively harmed by it, not just "not benefiting as much as others".
Whether the benefits outweigh the harm is a question I can't answer, but even if they do, it's still true that people are hurt.
None of these issues are easy or clear.
NY is a shell of what it was in 2005/2006. Yes, there are more tech firms, but the 500,000 or so jobs lost after the financial collapse in 2008 have not been made up for. I welcome Amazon bringing in well-paid positions, because as a New Yorker, I'd like the city to support a middle class, not just wealthy foreigners parking money into LLCd condos staying empty.
Much of the gentrification could be due to the free money and ZIRP policy in the US -- it is cheap to borrow and thus people, especially wealthy people/corps, borrow heavily and raise prices and rents. There is little correlation between actual income and rents in NYC because of this external booster.
Wouldn't it be better if the source of rent increases in NYC be the presence of lots of well paying jobs?
However, I think we can do better than giving massive tax breaks to megacorporations with bad records on labor relations and what has seemed to be an adversarial relationship to government and public services. I have no interest in seeing a replay of what’s happened to SF in NYC.
I think it’s important for cities to stand up for the interests of all their citizens, not just software developers and product managers (etc) in negotiations with increasingly powerful tech companies.
I live in that part of Seattle. It's the same part where people want to ban all cars because they never have to go anywhere that isn't walking distance, and their dog loves walking.
- Come next year, the default position is "you get a 10% rent hike by just paying the number on the lease."
- if you leave after a year, I've got price history at $4000 a month and can use that as an anchor for negotiations with the next tenant
There's nothing that says I have to start from fair market value and take a month off either. Say I call the apartment price 12/11ths of market value, but then advertise the net number and each month your great deal lets you pay only 11/11ths of FMV.
Bloomberg had something about this today[1] - something like 45% of leases in NYC have similar concessions.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-14/manhattan...
"One month free" is one of the oldest tricks in the NY real estate book, along with "preferential" rating.
That is fallacy of excluded other possibilities. Especially for a place like NYC.
I generally like AMZN, nevertheless I'm happy just on sheer principle that the bullying behavior by the 800lb gorilla didnt succeed this time.
It is exactly like a pushy customer demanding a discount on their groceries, saying: "Well, if I don't buy them you won't get any money at all!"
If you are confident you can sell enough groceries at the regular price, the economically correct decision is say "I don't need YOUR money" and laugh in their face.
And schemes like these exist in most countries out there, it's not just a US thing.
In your original example, the only reason why it would ever make sense is if the Saudi prince in question can somehow produce more wealth for the public than they'd pay in taxes. In that scenario, it's exactly the same in the end, once you balance everything - you have sold them citizenship for money.
And if they don't pledge to earn you more than you'd save, then why would you even consider such a deal?
Guaranteed sale is nice, but if I think I can clear out those cars pretty easily without a discount I'm gonna be a lot less inclined to do it.
"that otherwise wouldn't be paid at all"
The opposite is true, 100% of those taxes will be paid by some other business. Maybe you could make your argument about the New York City of the 1970s, but you sure as heck can not make that argument about the New York City of 2019. New York City is not starving for investment, rather, its biggest challenge nowadays is managing its fast growth. Other businesses will move into those buildings, and hire those workers, and they will pay normal taxes, which is a lot more than what Amazon offered.
But mostly, it's obvious growth that looks good for politicians who can say, "look, I brought jobs!" People notice it when a high profile company arrives whereas if your local chain expands, that's not even a news story.
Much of the political aspect of economics is due to the relative visibility of various events in the media.
This is New York City. There will be other businesses—ones that don't need to be lured by special deals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/business/economy/amazon-h...
Can you explain this some more? Are you suggesting that governments establish a target figure and adjust that year's tax policy to make sure it's met?
The existence of budget deficits suggests otherwise.
They are just suggesting that the site that Amazon would have occupied will be rented by some other business. Probably, that business will not have gotten all the tax-breaks that Amazon did. Therefore, the tax collected by NYC on that space will be larger with Amazon gone.
Also, pretty crappy to get downvoted for an honest question.
And would the employees of these businesses earn on average equal to or greater than the average NYC Amazon employee?
These aren't rhetorical questions, and I don't know enough about Long Island City to have a confident guess at the answers but when evaluating whether Amazon HQ is economically a net positive, these are important to know.
Does it matter? If they earn enough to live and spend locally then isn't that good enough?
Some Amazon employee giving a developer an extra 1000 bucks a month for a luxury apartment and getting their food delivered instead of going to the store isn't exactly an amazing economic benefit.
Obviously not all 25000 employees would get an extra 1k, but the point being...these things can scale significantly when you're talking about Amazon. It's not a trivial thing for SMBs to fill the void that Amazon is leaving.
That being said, businesses, like people, should have equal protection under the law. I amazon gets a sweetheart deal, every other business should too.
The US and NYC specifically is approaching historic levels of inequality. If you want to reverse that you have to say no to giving one of the most powerful companies in the world a sweetheart tax deal. If NYC doesn't say no then who will? The scuttling of this plan doesn't reflect a lack of rationality. It reflects different priorities than you have. The more powerful Amazon gets thanks to these sweetheart deals the more leverage they will have and that can mean negative consequences for the populace.
Why even pick NYC in first place ? That place, and other 1st tier cities, are red tape hell. Amazon should have known this.
What's irrational is not following up by banning every single deal of this type. Every single one.
If you can get high-tech companies who are willing massively expand to create lots of GOOD JOBS without have to short $3 billion from the state budget, that might mean that the $3 billion dollars was a total waste and boondoogle....
No they aren't. They're expanding by about 7000.
Was it highly subsidized by taxpayers like Amazon's purchase would have been?
It's not like Amazon was getting CASH to move to NYC.
But public does not like it and hence they had to put together a fake plan and waste money. Which could have otherwise gone into preventing real crimes.
More like it's a sugary pill that gives you diarrhea that also does nothing useful.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/majority-of-new-yorkers-support...
No wonder Gianaris, who represents our district in the NY Senate, was such a strong opponent.
The first is likely, the second is very unlikely. For the simple reason that Amazon would not plan such project in a market that is so hot that is able to generate tax income at the same rate as concentrated investment project of the Amazon HQ size. Surely, it won't turn into a barren wasteland, but I would not expect it to produce more in tax revenue than big development like Amazon HQ would.
When I was 16 LIC was a pretty sketchy place, but as of a few years ago when I lived there it was completely different. There is still some light industry related to food trucks and taxi cabs, but you have to walk pretty far to get to anything more significant. The only sketchy area I can think of is the Queensbridge projects but that is north of the 59th st. bridge and pretty far from the rest of the neighborhood.
Looks like you do, because now we have - no discount, no business.
> It's not like the economic development of NYC is dependent on Amazon
Of course, losing several billions of added value and 25K jobs won't kill the economy of the size of New York. Just as shooting oneself in the foot won't kill most healthy people. But keep at it, and sooner or later there would be a surprising development that the health is not what it once was...
Not the business that was conditional on the discount.
https://www.nycedc.com/program/relocation-and-employment-ass...
https://www.nycedc.com/program/industrial-commercial-abateme...
It doesn't make a lot of sense for a city to offer incentive programs and then complain when companies attempt to use them. The city should make up its political mind about what incentive programs are available, and who qualifies for them, as part of the decision about whether to offer such programs. Programs should then be implemented neutrally, in a way that does not play favorites or pick winners and losers. Many other companies have benefited from these programs - the entire point of these programs is to achieve some kind of policy objective by being used.
The uproar in this case seems more like political brinkmanship, not any kind of sound economic policy designed to benefit the constituents of the city. These incentive programs were presumably passed in the first place to benefit constituents - that's why they're there, to attract additional investment to areas of the city that otherwise would not receive it. ("The Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) provides a refundable business tax credit for commercial and industrial businesses relocating to designated areas of New York City and making capital improvements to their space")
If people in NYC think that these incentive programs are a bad idea, harmful, inappropriate, or whatever else, then they should direct their anger at their political representatives, and cancel those incentive programs - not direct anger at the companies who take up the offer that the city put forward.
A business choosing a location is a business transaction, as is city taxation choices. Both can freely choose how to woo the other.
NYC chose to lose possible decades of high paying jobs over their unwillingness to deal.
Other cities are not so fortunate, but Amazon has no interest in truly desperate cities (or even cities that are not so desperate but could use the boost, like Newark and Baltimore).
Amazon’s role is not charity. It is to be as productive as possible. NYC does have the role in being a good steward of resources for its citizens. It threw out a lot of money and job for them due to a vocal minority.
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/02/14/amazon-kills-plan-bui...
Animal cruelty? There is only a vocal minority who takes a public stance, despite this beeing a very clear cut issue in terms of public opinion. Migration is the other way round: most people don't give a fuck, but have a loud vocal base that will even hurt themselves to make a point and you will be heard.
It's not a vocal minority, it's a vocal subset of the majority.
A vocal minority is when the opponents of a popular viewpoint are louder than its proponents.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
I see the same thing with the Amazon HQ. It's easy for Amazon to spin it in a positive PR direction by talking about jobs and increased revenue, but the policy case for giving in to Amazon's demand is actually weak.
https://hbr.org/2018/07/landing-amazon-hq2-isnt-the-right-wa...
> Definition of proponent: one who argues in favor of something
Even if people are enabling something doesn't mean that they are proponents. Let's stop with the newspeak and use the correct words for things please.
They're not "ok" with the level of cruelty but in a pervasive environment of limited culinary and social choices, they're okay with living with that knowledge.
Personally, I think you get further raising better people than trying to impose a moral standard in a population that (for the most part) eats diets that hamper cognition and volition ala high sugar and ultra processed crap. Intermittent fasting and a decent diet would do much more for the quality of moral calculation of people than telling them that their entire culture is morally bad. Because we're humans who utilize different strata of values, not mere moral robots.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, the moralists and priesthoods of the world devalue the very small things which give arise to moral judgment: Diet, climate, and habit.
Not everyone has the money to choose differently.
At times there is no choice. This is especially true if you are a 15 year old. At 15, you basically eat what your parents eat. You can't generally afford food. You can't always just get a job if your parents won't provide education and/or if your school decides your grades aren't up to working. Oh, and you can't work all that often due to child labor laws.
At times, the actual choice is a bad one. Take eggs, for example. When I have the choice, I choose eggs from hens with larger cages. I realize these are hardly large, but they are better than the alternative. I've only lived one place that I could buy eggs directly from the source (during summer time) - but I'm literally an ocean plus some away from that now.
People honestly need a little bit of animal proteins lest they must take supplements. (Truth: I take vitamin D, as I can't make enough at my northerly location). I'm also mostly vegetarian. I eat fish once a week and I eat eggs and cheese.
Also, the way different accounts seem to seamlessly continue a deep and tangential discussion thread is also kind of suspicious. Almost like it’s one person who keeps switching alt accounts.
Regardless of peoples eating lifestyles it's undeniable that factory farms which produce most of the economically accessible meat are little concerned about animal welfare or the environment. The public on this matter also are least concerned about these matters related to the meat they buy off supermarket shelves, only when it's a video of a 'cute' animal being abused. It is only the minority of people in this instance that take a principled stance, if the silent majority did care we wouldn't be producing so much factory farmed meat after years of publicizing the abuse in the media.
I'm not a vegan but the way you characterize anyone who has a 'minority view' as some radical that only wants to cause problems is the attitude that allows corporations to operate it's abuse of worker standards and public funding to no one else's gain but themselves.
The discussion would have been clearer if the unambiguous term "factory farming" was used instead. The use of these ambiguous and disingenuous tactics of argumentation is reminiscent of PETA in particular. If you don't want to be characterized as a nutjob, don't act like one. That's my point.
Either someone shared with you an out-of-context link to this subthread for brigading purposes or you’re being totally disingenuous right now.
For myself (and maybe the others), your responses jumped one step beyond reasonable. Because someone used animal cruelty to describe factory farming, that poster is a hyperbolic vegan? I think the fact that you were being hyperbolic incited a few extra replies due to the... irony?
Edit: Cats are obligate carnivores and can't physically remain healthy without eating meat.
When people think animal cruelity they think beating your family dog vs the state of factory farming or organic farming.
I've been thinking a lot about trying to purchase pasture raised and sustainable meat products lately and part of that has been buying pasture raised eggs.
My last incredibly priced carton actually included a little slip inside with pictures of the hens in their pasture, and I believe even an offer to visit their farm.
Was really nice to go the other way. Instead of thinking about or ignoring the cruelty, to think about these happy hens.
But damn is it expensive!
Migration meaning what? Immigration within the US? That's been a hot button topic since the first Bush nationally, and has been the source of propositions in California since the my first memories of the early 80s. Interestingly, the more the internet was adopted, the more high profile the immigration debate became, nationally. Clinton talked quite a bit (even after his presidency), Bush Jr ignored it, and so on.
Reagan passed landmark immigration liberalization in 1986.
Clinton was an immigration hawk.
https://hackinglawpractice.com/blog/20-year-law-signed-conti...
GWB fought hard against his own party for immigration reform and liberalization.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration/senate-ki...
That is, in itself, incorrect.
> Reagan passed landmark immigration liberalization in 1986
Yes, bringing it to the forefront, but without a way to communicate effectively, the party in power passed landmark legislation without a national consensus. Most people were unaware, until it passed and had no recourse after.
> Clinton was an immigration hawk.
I'm not sure what you believe, but that's incorrect, imo. He gave strong lip service in "securing borders" but was instrumental in toothless legislation that paved the way for the current passive acceptance alongside the tripling (ish) of the illegal immigration. The insistence that legal immigration continued to outpace illegal immigration year-over-year before and after his presidency is classic Clinton doublespeak meant to push an agenda by interpretation, which he maintained after his presidency. See his last John Stewart Daily Show appearance. Winners write the stories, so this will likely just be forgotten by the future.
> Migration is the other way round: most people don't give a fuck, but have a loud vocal base that will even hurt themselves to make a point and you will be heard.
GWB's reforms were not well supported, so the initial point I made stands, regardless of what was reported. The idea that GWB was doing anything but appealing to a wider base. What he did, was speed up deportations (ending catch and release) and stopped talking about it after his election. So you can interpret that how you will, but it certainly wasn't "fighting hard".
An unrelated example: polls show large supermajorities in favor of many gun control proposals (universal background checks poll at ~90%, for example). But most people who say that they want it, don't consider the opposite stance on that a deal-breaker for their vote - there are many other issues that are more important to them. On the other hand, the 10% that is opposed, is very firmly opposed, and that issue is close to the top for many of them, to the point of single issue voting. And when those people all turn up in the Republican primaries and vote as a bloc, those votes are enough to prevent candidates that displease that crowd from even getting to the general. And so you have all those party line votes, with every single Republican voting against, even though the majority of their constituents - and even the majority of their supporters - would prefer them to vote differently.
Even after reading this, I think the claim “most New Yorkers supported the project” is extremely dubious.
Because the entire "competition" was a sham. Amazon was never going to park the future of the company into a place lacking talent.
> The proposal was most popular among Black and Hispanic Queens residents and least popular among White Manhattan residents
That's a good point, but the counter is that the Black and Hispanic residents are the ones who would end up pushed out by Amazon's white and asian workers.
Surprised AMZN had such a thin skin.
And after all this, they are going to move into vacant office buildings in DC near the airport, and in Nashville.
Instead they got a pretty massive backlash that adds more fuel to the already burning story about Amazon's mistreatment of workers, Amazon's 0% tax rate, Amazon lobbying defeating taxes in Seattle, etc... They have a PR problem already. They are bringing a whole lot of negative attention to themselves. They will have it worse in the future when they try to do the same sort of thing in Washington state.
They folded because staying in wasn't worth it.
Besides this sniffs of the "yea build shelters everywhere but my block" attitude.
So who makes up this supposed groundswell of local opposition? People that moved in to one of those shiny new towers last week and are already looking to slam the door behind themselves?
Amazon could have easily ignored them for all eternity if they wanted. A vocal minority can't influence a random housing development, you think they had any say over Amazon? That's a STRETCH
If Amazon required all bids and contracts be made public AND brought in the media circus to invite scrutiny that would seem to be the most in the public interest.
Shaking down someone for money is done by threatening them, i.e. extortion. Amazon did not threaten NYC, and therefore it is not a shakedown.
Im not sure what the point of any of this was.
Also, "nobody bats an eye" is not right either - there are tons of protests against Google, which has been widely reported. They just didn't have a focus point like Amazon did, but if any city had a wide contingent of young socialist politicians caring about PR much more than for the jobs for the city population - the same could happen to Google too.
The big dog and pony show was about asking for major tax benefits. They're still welcome to open a giant LIC office, they just won't get showered with a tax windfall for it. That's Amazon's decision that it wasn't worth it.
It would also be in Long island City which would provide a huge influx of new workers and move that neighborhood forward in development rapidly. The down side would be that it would push some residents and business owners out but this is simply a fact of life in NYC where on a long enough time line every undesirable neighborhood eventually become desirable simply because of increase in residents and increase in real estate prices. That would also conversely make adjacent neighborhoods more attractive.
As for the tax breaks those would eventually be off set and it would still be cheaper than the amount that was spent on a useless Subway line that took a decade and really added no real capacity where it mattered.
And it's in Long island City not in Manhattan like Facebook and Google.
Evidently not. Their tax break in Northern Virginia was not nearly as egregious (northern VA resident here; I'm totally fine with what we're paying for what we're getting). By contrast, what they were getting for LIC was insane.
And by not having anyone else lined up and by looking at the backlash over the size of the tax break, I'd be surprised if anyone else approached that amount, so it doesn't look like they'll get that tax break regardless.
I just don't understand this argument. It's like "Someone's gonna get fucked, so I'd prefer it be me."
That tax break is real money. Money that your community will not be able to spend on education, infrastructure, police, parks, all the things that make a place worth living in. Why would you hand that over to a company that doesn't need it?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
I'd rather have money go towards our public transit system, no matter how fucked up it is at the moment, than spend another cent on bringing tech jobs that will come here no matter what. NYC's been a "true technology hub" for a long time, regardless of one giant company deciding to abstain from coming here.
Increasing density isn’t going to make subway lines cheaper by the way.
Sure, but it's real money that your community doesn't get either way.
You're living in a fantasy world if you believe that the choice was legitimately between "Tax money and 25,000 jobs" or "No tax money and 25,000 jobs." No, the choice has always been between "No tax money and 25,000 jobs" or "No tax money and no jobs." You're not getting the tax money either way. Either Amazon builds with subsidies and you get no tax money from them, or they go elsewhere, and you get no tax money from them.
Your decision is really between "Do you want 25,000 jobs, or not?" 25,000 jobs whose incomes that can be taxed. 25,000 jobs that are going to shop at local stores, pay for local gas, pay local rents, raise local property values, and so on.
And that choice is pretty damn clear.
The talent required is not evenly spread throughout the cities that bid on HQ2, and a world-class city like NYC does not need Amazon as much as Amazon needs them.
Another way would be that only taxing the jobs, and all the economic activity they might generate would still not cover the strain that the company would put on the local system.
Now they need to start taxing Wall St. heavily.
All those things cost money. Usually, that money would come from taxing residents and local businesses. But given that we've agreed that the city wouldn't be getting that money, it's not at all clear that those 25,000 jobs would be a good thing.
Except that's not the choice either - as others have pointed out. If Amazon doesn't build something in NY, some one else will over the same time period. Will it be more or less than 25,000 jobs? Who knows. But NY is already an attractive metropolitan area judging by its density and property value. It's not a struggling rural town that can't attract talent and capital.
And almost certainly because of this struggle, the next City they try and go to isn't going to give them nearly as sweet a deal. They will demand more. Struggles like this are effective.
So no, that's NOT the choice to be made. That choice is something you've pulled from nowhere.
Well why is trusting you to build parks better than just spending your tax money on parks? Why do we need a new indirection in that process?
Regardless of what Amazon does, a for profit company is going to receive those tax breaks. They are available to anyone who meets the qualifications.
So it isn't "handing over" anything that isn't going to be handed over to a company already.
You run a store. You put up a sign offering a 50% discount. I walk in the store and you tell me there is no discount. I walk out. Guess what? You didn't get any money and I didn't get anything out of the deal.
Amazon backing out of HQ2 doesn't mean you get to keep the money. You never had the money.
That's more like what they were going to do.
Think of it this way. Walmart doesn't pay some of their employees enough to survive, so those employees get food stamps. Walmart makes enough profits to pay those people the equivalent value in food stamps, but they don't. It can be said that the government is giving Walmart some amount of money because Walmart's profits are higher because of the food stamp expenditure.
The federal government is not sending money to Walmart via a bank transfer, but there is an exchange of money taking place.
Now think about this in terms of city services. Twenty five thousand employees would not pay enough taxes to make up for what they use in city services combined with what the organization uses. Certainly not 3 billion dollars worth. In that sense, the 3 billion dollars could be seen as NY basically paying Amazon to give 25K professional class people jobs. There are other social side effects that are hard to assign a dollar value to.
Does that make more sense? No one is saying that money would come from no where. It helps if you assume for a moment that your ideological opponents are actually smart people who aren't just deluded, but that they have an interest that is actually in opposition to "your side".
You're just letting the giant school bully take over your neighborhood for below market value (due to the massive tax breaks) and declaring "Look! We're a tech center!"
I don't see how "below market value" follows from "massive tax breaks". Are you implying that the standard tax rate is somehow determined by the market? Because it's not, and "market value" is whatever the market is willing to pay for it. Unless they have someone other than Amazon offering the same benefits for less, then Amazon offer was market value.
Those people might not currently be in NYC, and they might have moved to NYC to work for Amazon. NYC would have received more income tax revenue if high earners moved there from somewhere else.
Claiming that they are simply because they want to expand and hire into their market does not result in successful outcomes for either party.
This has certainly been true for Seattle, fwiw.
Not paying Federal income tax isn't paying no taxes. Also, the "zero federal tax" meme is popular among the Bernie Sanders crowd, however, much of Amazon's credits were due to paying stock-based compensation. In 2017, they paid out almost a billion dollars in stock compensation -- compensation for which recipients are taxed -- and taxed at a higher rate than the equivalent funds would have been taxed if retained by the company since such compensation is taxed as ordinary income -- not only are federal income taxes due, but also social security and medicare taxes. The point is that $917 million in stock compensation was written off against Amazon's income, but that $917m likely yields roughly $250 million in federal tax revenue , while if that were taxed as company income, it would yield roughly $110m given the historical effective tax rate paid by Amazon.
Essentially this: If Amazon didn't exist, the US government would be far worse off in terms of tax revenues, despite Amazon paying "zero" taxes. An intelligent view of the situation wouldn't look at "federal taxes paid" by the entity of Amazon, but their total tax revenue impact on the United States government -- including their state and local, and taxes paid by their employees. If you wanted to be more intellectually honest about Amazon and taxes, you'd also include the tax impact of everyone that profits as a result of Amazon. There's also the impact at the consumer level -- the price of products is the sum of all of the inputs used to produce, market and deliver that product. If you raise the price of any of those inputs, prices necessarily increase. Let's say we increase the taxes of Amazon -- that means that their "Hefty Garbage Bags" are now selling for more money, but that also means that competitors selling Hefty Garbage Bags can also raise their prices. Essentially corporate taxes have the same market-wide effect as a tariff -- raising prices for everyone. Who gets harmed most by higher prices for consumer goods? It isn't the "rich." It's the poor and middle class. Lower prices for goods helps the economy far more than the equivalent amount collected in taxes due to deadweight loses.
In fact they tore up an existing redevelopment plan for HQ2
Although I hope that it’s a bustling tech hub in 5 years.
My comment is about tech workers working in that area. I think this is better for that area to have highly paid workers in remote queens who can live or commute in.
There’s already a ton of tech companies in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The new change would be to have a tech hub in LIC.
On the contrary, much of what makes Queens quite unique is threatened by the one thing we know would follow on the heels of something like an Amazon HQ landing here: even more heated real estate speculation fueled by absentee capital, small businesses losing their leases, rent hikes, and general homogenization.
Nothing about Queens needs to be preserved in amber, but neither does anything about Queens require some intervention to bring up to par. Possibly public transit but that is true of every borough.
Certainly it will increase property values but I don’t think it will be absentee capital as the demand will be driven by something that requires occupancy, working at hq2.
Maybe Queens doesn’t require intervention, maybe it does. Since there’s no hq2 we’ll close to seeing the contra factual of not having this intervention. Maybe the area grows substantially without it.
The bottom line is that the Amazon deal had very broad support in NYC, and a very vocal irrational minority just ruined it for everyone.
Anyway, for me it hinges on how much special treatment Amazon got, $100K in tax abatements per job seems excessive, but others say it was pretty standard, would have been a huge anchor tenant for NYC tech and LIC, so much smoke blown on both sides it's hard to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
If they want to sell and support AWS to bigcos in NYC they are going to need a major presence regardless, not sure how much sense it makes for their other businesses to have a big HQ in NYC.
It's possible to be both at the same time.
That's before other taxes, like property (directly or indirectly through rent), sales, etc.
They don't need 25k jobs to support AWS clients in NYC. It's not like they're supporting on-site installations.
The jobs also tend to include things like construction workers, etc. So if you hire 500 people to build the place over 2 years that's 1,000 jobs created.
Her argument against is that the Amazon HQ would further gentrification and she was appalled by the government subsidies. So she'd rather limit new growth, prevent new jobs, and stifle wealth to prevent luxury condos and Starbucks from going up? Make no sense, she is literally preventing her constituents from moving up the economic ladder.
she's anti status-quo but are unwilling to sacrifice short term for it.
basically her dream case scenario is to tax amazon 5B and then invest 3B it to bring them to Queens.. and then rake the returns going forward. In what fantasy world would that ever play out?
People have done studies on income mobility and inter-generational income mobility. The studies say that it's getting worse, not better.
Yes, people can move up/down, but most don't, and it's happening less over time.
Anyway, I don't have the resources and time to go through the entire Forbes list, but I suspect there are a lot more people than most would believe and perhaps like to acknowledge from middle class or "lower" class environments.
Income is a strongly inherited trait. Look at this absurdly linear plot in section 2: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01...
The only deviations from pure correlation are that the extremely poor and rich are EVEN MORE likely to be extremely poor or rich.
Most of the research I've seen uses quintiles as a proxy for "class".
If you look downthread, I've linked some that disagrees with you re: USA vs other anglosphere countries.
Amazon is not that pedigree-driven, most people I know who work there went to decent mid-ranked but not Ivy League level schools. Wall Street (front office) and big consulting firms are literally pedigree driven to the point where they often only recruit on Ivy League campuses, Amazon and most other big tech companies are more egalitarian caring more about the tech interview than your diploma.
Sounds like it'd be good for landlords, I'm not sure about the person living paycheck to paycheck to make rent.
Increasing property values also mean increasing property taxes, which show up in expenses and are due every year whether or not you have the money to pay them.
Does taking out a home equity line to pay your taxes sound like a good idea to you? Me neither, and that's why rising property values are often not welcomed by residents who are not already financially well-off.
This does not even get into the impact on renters, who might face being evicted so a property owner can sell, or rents rising faster than their wages.
Property values are not necessarily wealth. It is entirely possible to gentrify existing homeowners out of their homes despite increasing their property values -- this moves homeowners down the economic ladder.
Yes, selling their house technically puts fresh cash in their pocket, but only by drastically increasing their cost of living and by making them search for new housing (which by definition will have to be somewhere cheaper than their current neighborhood, since by definition they can no longer afford their current one).
All of this is usually a large net loss in total wealth, despite the sale of their property. Owning a gentrifying home gives you the illusion of wealth building, but if you live in that home, it's really just lifestyle inflation until you sell out.
None of the above is a hypothetical, either. That is an accurate description of how real-world Gentrification usually plays out in Midwestern/Flyover USA today.
So, what's the benefit to new york? Yea, there are 25000 new jobs. But the choice isn't 25000 jobs or no jobs. Its 25000 jobs with amazon and some number of jobs from other businesses. Other businesses will employ those high skill workers because there aren't enough to go around.
Is this any different from how other companies do it?
> they'll be taking jobs from other organizations, like small businesses, who can't afford to compete with Amazon.
How many small businesses in LIC are competing with Amazon for business/workers? Does LIC even have tech jobs? I lived in NYC for 5 years working in tech, and I don't recall ever interviewing for a tech job in LIC.
> So, what's the benefit to new york?
25,000 jobs with $100k+ salaries. I get that there aren't enough native native New Yorkers to fill the jobs, but since when is NYC not a city of transplants? Amazon or not, this is already the state of things, and I don't see that changing. I mean LIC is already a ghost town of glass luxury residential apartment towers.
> the choice isn't 25000 jobs or no jobs. Its 25000 jobs with amazon and some number of jobs from other businesses. Other businesses will employ those high skill workers because there aren't enough to go around.
Is there a strong demand to build out jobs in LIC matching the 25k that Amazon would've? I'm not being facetious, genuinely wondering. I only went to LIC a few times, and my impression was that it seemed like a ghost town of glass luxury residential apartment towers. I don't recall seeing a thriving office/commercial center. Seems like everyone just commutes into Manhattan to work.
But I'm sure the students are actually grateful that they were spared from Amazon and living close to home, and that the Bay Area residents will continue to welcome each new batch with open arms!
The NY metropolitan area is ~20M people, but it's clearly much weaker when it comes to tech than the bay area at only ~7M people (I'd say, a magnitude less in number of tech startups alone), and somewhat stronger than the Boston metro area at 4M but not significantly so. Having lived in all three (and now living in Manhattan for 4 years), I don't think for example there is significantly more tech meetups (maybe even less?) or startups (definitely numerically more, but not of better quality) than in Boston, while by numbers alone it should be a whole magnitude greater.
The USA already has a tax structure in place. Amazon could afford to pay the existing taxes if they wanted to. Heck, they're paying their tax accountants to figure out how not to pay those taxes. Why doesn't Amazon just buy, say, Nebraska, and set up shop there?
But first, getting rid of the corporate capture of both major political parties, elected officials, government and policy-making is a precondition to do anything to reverse the neoliberal, cannibalistic anarcho-capitalism inverted totalitarianism being forced on us.
Im not saying its wrong, but us muggles worth less than countries have no real, meaningful say in the future at this, and to be fair also at most other, points in history.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was probably the last possible chance to correct course. Further attempts need to somehow capture a greater mindshare than the immediate aftermath of Bush's imperialism, wanton greed and corruption throughout the federal for thirty years across four presidents, the desolation of the working class, and the unabased billionaire wellfare that bailouts represented.
We are now a decade later into corporate and wealth consolidation, a decade after Citizens United, another decade of corporate media brainwashing the "average" American into compliance and obedience. And this is a global conglomerate of business that will deter and influence all governments and societies to bow to their interests. The only way out at this point is an internal struggle between these private men and women of influence between those who have ethics and the interests of humanity at heart and the majority.
"...Amazon employees are apparently eager to get a head start on the New York City real estate game.
Condo sales in Long Island City are soaring following the announcement that the Queens, New York, [a] neighborhood will host part of Amazon's HQ2, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to The Journal, one brokerage firm sold 150 units in four days last week — 15 times its usual volume — after Amazon announced plans to open a headquarters in Long Island City...."
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-buy-apartme...
“...a dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant. [...] and though it is, no doubt, extremely useful to him, it is as his clothes and household furniture are useful to him.” [...] If it is to be let to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue which he derives either from labor, or stock, or land. ..."
(12th paragraph) https://www.bartleby.com/10/201.html
My advice to my kids is that they should buy a dwelling and not live in it. Let it be an investment, let someone else pay the mortgage and the upkeep as well.
However I think those buyers will still do just fine. I doubt very many people have lost money by investing in NYC real estate.
Regardless, I suspect Amazon employees would know better than to bank on Amazon following through on a commitment.
The whole splitting HQ2 I think showed this. Like it's not even an "HQ" in any sense of the word. It's just an expansion.
Also with talk of "25k jobs"... what jobs? Are we talking software engineers or warehouse workers? There's a difference.
I don't know the inner workings of this but it seems like Cuomo was the driver here with de Blasio on board. This was a missed opportunity. NYC needs several things from NYS that are politically unpalatable upstate. Top of that list is:
- Property tax reform; and
- Congestion pricing.
NYS grossly favours SFHs for property taxes. For example, a $3m brownstone in Park Slope I saw had ~$700/month in property taxes. A similarly priced apartment would have more like $1500-2000/month taxes. A $100m apartment would be taxed at ~$15k/month.
NYC has on several occasions tried to introduce congestion pricing on people driving in or into Manhattan (something I 100% support) but the efforts have failed as this is the jurisdiction of NYS and NYS has no interest in this (so far).
Why not frame this issue as NYC supporting these efforts to fix issues with NYC like these? The deal may have gotten much more traction were this the case.
So I understand the need for government intervention in large projects, say if Amazon were to build 8m sq ft of office space. Regulatory approval can be nigh on impossible.
That much office space is hard to find in NYC. I think Amazon missed the boat with Hudson Yards (probably the last place this would've been possible in Manhattan).
I agree with other commenters that the net effect of this is about zero. Amazon is trying to have a PR moment. They'll still expand in NYC as it suits their needs. They'll still get tax breaks like any large corporation in NYS/NYC would.
This really is just a corporate tantrum.
Workers with an average salary of $150,000, I think it's disingenuous to act like you don't know that but you're also an expert in property tax reform.
That being said, there's no city-level income tax rebate. Assuming the tax brackets currently in effect hold steady until the full 25k jobs promise was fulfilled, the city of New York would get ~3.8% of $150k * 25k jobs = ~$142.5 million/year once the 25k job mark is reached [2].
[0]: https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program
[1]: Note how the 6.85% bracket only applies to income above $215.4k; income above $1.08 million gets taxed at 8.82%; consequently Amazon will get more rebated than employees paid in income tax the vast majority of the time. See the second table of page 57: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/it201i.pdf#page=...
[2]: The ~3.8% is approximated based off of page 69 of https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/it201i.pdf#page=...
Quoted from page 2 of the Virginia agreement [0]: "If any of the persons holding New Jobs are paid “wages” in any calendar year in excess of $850,000, as escalated 1.5% per year, as shown on Exhibit D, the amount of wages in excess of $850,000, or the higher escalated amount, shall not be included in clause (A)."
[0]: https://d39w7f4ix9f5s9.cloudfront.net/a1/f2/85b7a8db41379e15...
Property tax reform could work for single family homes if we decoupled property tax from land tax. NYS should only raise taxes on the value of land given the surrounding population density, natural properties and accessibility to public infrastructure. Check out some Henry George, if you're interested in learning more.
What happens if someone has owned the home for 60 years, they're older and retired, and suddenly it so happens their neighborhood got popular a decade ago and their property values doubled, and some rezoning happened at a nearby avenue. That's one example. How about we try the academic flirtations with tax experiments at a smaller scale elsewhere, first?
"For example, a $3m brownstone in Park Slope I saw had ~$700/month in property taxes"
- Park Slope brownstone, $548/month: https://streeteasy.com/sale/1375411
- Park Slope condo, $1740/month: https://streeteasy.com/building/105-8-avenue-brooklyn/3
Note: if you look into this a lot of condos have deceptively low monthly taxes due to a tax scheme (now defunct) called J-51 (IIRC) where property taxes started at 0 and would go to normal levels over 20-30 years.
All that said, if you build a brand new single or multi-family home someplace, anyplace, the taxes will be pretty high. It's all about the grandfathering of older asessments and a state cap on tax rate increases (20% a year I believe), which is allowed an adjustment if renovation is done (or a fresh assessment if it's new).
The Park Slope home you had was probably newly renovated. That matters - the sale price doesn't. 700 is even a lot, relatively speaking. In any case, houses from the 19th century cost money to maintain, and sometimes, shockingly, they're populated by people who can't afford 1k a month in property tax. The property values went up high and fast - are we going to punish homeowners for that? This isn't a suburb where taxes must come primarily from property tax - there's a NYC-specific income tax, as you're probably well aware.
Then, here's something else, tax those 2,3,4-families more, rents will go up as a result; they're free-market rate apartments, not rent stabilized.
I don't know what any of this has to do with Amazon, though.
NYC has on several occasions tried to introduce congestion pricing on people driving in or into Manhattan (something I 100% support) but the efforts have failed as this is the jurisdiction of NYS and NYS has no interest in this (so far).
They introduced it - it just impacts taxis and for-hire vehicles.
I am also proud of my cantankerous fellow New Yorkers who fought this.
How about a little more? The planet is sad because 25,000 people won't be taking the subway to work.
Your math is way off.
Why do they have to involve the city politicians in the decision-making process if they don't need any special treatment?
[1] "While New York City has not offered Amazon any direct subsidies, the company also plans to take advantage of two city tax breaks that will further sweeten the deal by nearly $1.3 billion.
One is the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program, which offers businesses moving to certain parts of the city a tax credit of up to $3,000 per employee for 12 years. The program will benefit Amazon to the tune of $897 million, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
The other is the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program, which provides property tax abatements. It will be worth nearly $400 million to Amazon, Cuomo said."
(https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nys-amazon-deal-wha...)
I forget where, but I remember seeing someone dig into the details of the offer and Amazon was not actually getting that much better of a deal than any other NYC business.
The sheer number of people from NY saying they are "proud" of this shows just how far removed people are from reality.
Right now it seems heavy in the financial sector to me. Arguably tech is a big part of the economic future, so one view is that it would be smart to have some of that.
It's my understanding that while NYC isn't really a tech hub, the startup / tech scene there has grown stronger in recent years. So I pretty much assumed they were trying to capitalize on this momentum and do a big push to achieve something like critical mass.
Whether that's a worthy goal is very much for debate, but it seemed like that's what they thought they were getting in exchange for the sweet deal they were offering.
Cost of Living in NY is higher and Amazon will have to pay higher wages if it puts jobs there rather than a place like Nashville. That's higher wages for the same job. Pretty much every company has a cost of living multiplier and pays different wages for the same position based on where you live. So given that Amazon has a choice to locate in the low wage or high wage area, it seems reasonable for the high wage area to offer to offset some of those extra costs. Otherwise why would AMZN even consider a high cost of living area like NYC?
Now to me it's clear that the market signal is that they should open the new office in a lower cost of living area, which is what's going to happen now. A small victory for reason. This means more Amazon workers will be able to afford to buy a house and Amazon will be able to pay them less. Good news.
Junior devs and low performing seniors.
Amazon claimed my city didn't have enough talent.
What they meant is that 6 figures is too much to pay per programmer.
Google already has some dev offices in cheaper areas, like Pittsburgh, where office space is cheaper and the salaries they pay slightly lower. And yet, they still choose to double their headcount in NYC.
Just saying, "well I guess Google is just being irrational for no reason" would be simplistic, childish thinking. Google doesn't choose sites or increase headcount on a whim. They're going to do it because there are real advantages to the major tech hubs.
Educated guess, as someone who works at Google now and used to work at Amazon: it's easier to attract people to major tech hubs, because they offer more career stability in the form of having lots of other tech companies around. Being in Kansas City making a Google salary might sound great, until you realize that if you lost that job for some reason, there's nothing around in the same tier.
Also, the kind of person who wants to live in a cheaper city, with a big house for their family, is also the kind of person who's going to be reluctant to move from wherever they currently live anyway. That demographic is going to be hard to convince.
people want to live and work there. especially young people
as you said, couple's can more likely both find jobs, even if they work in vastly different sectors
talent pool is larger
many other businesses (potential customers) are there
Location, Location, Location.
Yes it's cheaper to live and run a business in Kansas but then you're in Kansas.
But at some point people want to start families and buy a house and that starts to take precedence over being in a cool area. The only issue is jobs -- can they work remote, can they find a local employer, can they work for themselves?
So there is a huge demand for higher paying jobs in lower cost areas compared to the demand for higher paying jobs in higher cost areas. You personally may think it unbearable to live in Scottsdale, AZ or Minneapolis, MN, but most people find it pleasant enough and will pull the trigger as soon as they can find a job that pays even 2/3 of what they are earning in SF or NY.
Another data point is the taxes.
This might be also interesting (pdf warning): https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2019-0...
NYC is the most populated and density populated city in the country, which is just another way of saying its the city with the highest demand. If most people rather work and live in Scottsdale than that would be the most populated and density populated city in the country.
So, take city A - where house prices cost, $100 and it has 100,000 people. In City B, house prices cost $500 and it only has 10,000 people.
You still don't see the full demand curve for either city. The statement "City A is in more demand than City B" is not a meaningful statement. That's what I was trying to say. I was trying to point out the absurdity of just counting people as a way of inferring the shape of a curve.
Now, how could your statement be changed to make it well defined? You could say "At every price point, City A will have more people than City B". Which means the curve of demand for A is above the curve of demand for B. But is that really true for NY? I doubt it. Maybe, but you'd need to provide some other evidence. And such evidence is hard to find, because NYC is a donor city -- more people move out every year than move in.
https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/coming-or-going-nyc-migrat...
The only reason why NYC's total population is growing is because births outpace deaths and it is a port city for new immigrants. But for US-US transfers, it's shrinking by about 2% each year. So at least in the universe of US cities, people tend to choose to live elsewhere.
But that doesn't mean that NYC is a bad city. It most likely means that it's a little out of equilibrium -- most likely because of the influx of immigrants. E.g. you can imagine that existing New Yorkers have some equilibrium price, and then an increase of immigrants raises that a bit, so that some of the non-immigrants leave. This is true in general of port cities: you see an influx from outside the city that pushes a certain number of the people inside out.
Now are these immigrants coming to NY because they prefer it to Phoenix or whatever? No, they are coming to NY because it's a port of entry and because they have relatives there. Immigrants tend to cluster and stay put, which is a shame, because most would be better off living elsewhere, just because they tend to cluster in ghettoes in high cost areas. That's a whole other interesting effect -- why immigrants tend to stop at the first place they land and stay there.
How else could your statement be changed to make it well defined? Well, you can say that real estate prices are really high in New York, meaning that overall it is in great demand compared to other cities where real estate prices are cheaper. This is, I think, your strongest argument. Except there are a lot of factors that affect real estate prices -- including zoning restrictions, prop 13, and most importantly # of high paying jobs, etc. For NY, that would be Wall St jobs or FIRE more generally. Now you could argue that NY has so many Wall St jobs because it's great, but we both know better. There are historical reasons for these types of agglomeration effects that are kinda arbitrary and in the case of NY go way, way back. Even in the period of white flight when NY was dangerous as hell and half empty you had all those Wall St jobs concentrated there.
So, bottom line, it's really hard to infer preferences from the data you are citing and even from the better arguments you could have made but chose not to.
Some people do, yes.
> and buy a house
Some people do, yes.
Others want to just stay in an exciting, vibrant area. You're projecting your values here.
> will pull the trigger as soon as they can find a job that pays even 2/3 of what they are earning in SF or NY.
The very fact that such jobs are somewhat uncommon, even though programming ought to be the kind of thing that's easy to distribute/make remote, should tell you something.
Once a company reaches critical mass, it doesn't need access to VCs, and isn't able to hire superstar programmers at scale, so the quality of the average employee declines compared to what you see in startups. Now you start talking more about repeatable, workman-like code rather than brilliant groundbreaking code. You can still do the latter in a research center that you can keep in the hub and move a lot of the other code to the periphery, which will be most of your employees. After all, we are talking about HQ2 here.
At the same time, you have housing markets that are so insane that the majority of your developers will not be able to buy a house, which means they are going to leave you or demand really high wages -- wages that a company with 20K devs can't afford.
This is the inexorable logic of the market. Suppose we are not talking about people but some other scarce resource. Very expensive leather. You put that into the exotic cars but when you need to produce in high volume, you look for cheaper substitutes in order to help scale your operations. Everyone likes to think they are rockstar developers, but your typical AMZN HQ2 employee is not a rockstar, they are probably just a decent programmer (Not that there's anything wrong with that :P ). It just doesn't make sense to put HQ2 into a place where you have to pay 200K to win over the marginal employee.
No, I'd say they have about equal value. Consider, Google has tens of thousands of tech workers in the bay area. How many other metros could they feasibly relocate their HQ to? Even if you assume that only, say, a third of their employees decline to relocate with them, you're possibly looking at ~10,000 job openings you'd need to staff up on within a year or two to not be absolutely crippling.
> You can still do the latter in a research center that you can keep in the hub and move a lot of the other code to the periphery, which will be most of your employees.
This completely glosses over how companies work. Google doesn't have two tiers of software engineer types, where one gets more exciting stuff and better pay/benefits, while the other languishes on boring things with mediocre pay. Trying to split up the company that way, "we'll just hire crappier engineers in [cheap place] now and treat them worse because they're dumber" would be a total disaster.
> you have housing markets that are so insane that the majority of your developers will not be able to buy a house, which means they are going to leave you or demand really high wages -- wages that a company with 20K devs can't afford.
While this is absolutely a problem, and I applaud efforts to increase affordability either in the areas where tech HQ's already are, or by distributing more offices elsewhere, you're missing the obvious fact that these major tech companies already do this, and it already works. Yes, some people leave. The strongest, and probably most valuable employees largely don't, because they make enough to offset the increased cost of housing: a T6 at Google may make 400-500k/year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/17/google-...
Amazon already has a presence in NYC.
Amazon already has an office in New York City, as well as a sizeable presence in New Jersey just outside the city limits (within commuting distance), split between two New Jersey offices, last I checked.
Disclaimer, I'm one of those 5k. Currently I work from home 99% of the time because the office spaces Amazon has in NY aren't fantastic. It would have been nice to have a new headquarters building, but I'll still be enjoying working from home now I guess.
It's pretty amazing how large some of the non-home offices are at these mega tech companies.
How many of those are working in tech? When I interviewed at Amazon NYC in 2016, I think there were only around 100 software engineers there. Has it grown a lot since then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue
111 8th is a major internet traffic exchange point. It's also gargantuan, it's 2.9 million square feet and occupies a whole city block.
One of the interesting things about 111 8th is that it was designed for much higher than normal pounds per square foot floor loading. Which means that Google could convert the entire thing to datacenter space if they really wanted to. Already a significant portion of it is conditioned datacenter/telecom space run by tenants.
These real estate acquisitions were so large that they explicitly needed to be called out on the quarterly earnings calls to explain why CapEx exploded for that quarter.
At Google's densities, they would never run a datacenter in Manhattan. POPs, sure, like their peering with https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/16, but that's it.
They're more of a managed services provider.
"The Internap expansion represents approximately 1.3MW of additional critical power in a severely constrained downtown NY market.”
https://www.inap.com/press-release/internap-continues-green-...
That was 34000 sqft. Equinix has 36000.
Edit: they had 75K by the time they left. DRT says they have 110K.
Google on the other hand bought 111 8th ave 8 years ago(houses 7K employees) and now they are opening a new space in the same area that will house an additional 12K more employees[1]. That will bring their total to 19K employees in a 10 year time frame.
And this was all done without extracting corporate subsidies and without all the pageantry.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plans-large-new-york-cit...
> Whereas if you work in LIC it's not like you can really commute into the city from New Jersey or Stamford.
Why not? Take the Path to the E or the metro north to the 7.
LIC will never become a second Midtown because its transport connections are so poor.
In what sense? I used to work in LIC and it was pretty easy to get to. Lots of lines go though Queensboro Plaza.
And god help you the days there are mets games if you're taking the 7.
Could you please edit swipes like that out of your comments here? They acidify discussion. Your comment would be fine without that bit.
The reality is that NYC is not Wisconsin, they don't need to give out money.
EDIT: I'd even go a step further, and predict that both Amazon and Google will also have ludicrously large presences in the DC-NOVA area in 10 years as well. In fact, Amazon's presence in the DC-NOVA area will be even bigger than they initially said it would.
The story of the Foxconn factory, for example, is one of Wisconsin acting as if you can give a bunch of money to a company that smells of technology, and they will plunk a bunch of jobs for highly educated and skilled people in the middle of a region with relatively few highly educated and skilled workers. Which, it never worked that way. It never will work that way.
Companies go to places that can fill their staffing needs. Wisconsin, which has been systematically defunding its education system in order to re-route that money toward corporate subsidies, is undercutting its own ability to fill those staffing needs. I don't know that everyone in the state realizes it, but Wisconsin is stumbling all over itself to become the darling dumping ground for companies that are founded[1] in cities and states with the kinds of intellectual and entrepreneurial ferments you get around well-run and well-funded university systems to put their call centers, distribution centers, big boxes mostly full of robots, and other things they don't want to waste money putting in a more affluent area.
[1] I think "founded" is a key word, here, too. Supporting local entrepreneurship is the key to prosperity. Which mostly means getting out of the way of your entrepreneurs. If you get into a bidding wars to acquire the office where a company puts all their jobs that didn't merit being located at HQ, not only do you end up overspending - the people deciding what to bid aren't playing with their own money, so what else did you expect? - but you're also draining the talent pool that supports their growth.
tl;dr: The cart goes behind the horse.
As long as some places in strategic areas do the incentive thing, it’s hard not to.
It’s difficult though as it’s a prisoner’s dilemma type situation.
Definitely a bad situation and a story told a thousand times in the US
If anything the workers left even more because there was even less attractiveness to be there.
If dumping on ostensible conservatives for wantonly doling out government largesse is wrong, I don't want to be right.
That said, FWIW, the greater context here is an article about New York getting in on the game, too.
Additionally,it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon has seen the obscene amounts of money Microsoft is making pitching cloud security and general technical support to the government, and wants in on it.
Agree with all that, I suspect DC-NOVA will be a whole lot bigger than 25k workers now for Amazon.
I really have no interest in them though. Primarily remote work is the best.
I'm just saying that the smart money is clearly on DC-NOVA in the long term with NYC as the next big winner there.
New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, less than 50 years ago.
Detroit’s population started declining as early as the 1950s as companies moved to the suburbs.
New York has a world-class, diverse economy, and I expect it to continue to be a central engine of the American and world economy for our lifetimes, but it does require good stewardship to nurture the economy.
We may be on the cusp of a reversal of the great urban migration of the last several decades, with populations moving into suburban satellite cities as remote work gains acceptance, driverless cars allow for easier commutes, logistics companies and drones allow for easy delivery of goods to your doorstep, and urban housing prices continue to relentlessly outpace wage growth.
The fact that you (and many others) consider this a win is an attempt to revise history. This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly. That deal is gone. But feel free to pat yourself on the back for not "falling for it". Maybe it works out great as other companies will lease those buildings and hire a combined ~20k employees averaging $150,000 in compensation, but that's likely not going to happen.
Cut off your nose to spite your face.
There's now way to. Campus expansions are blocked by layers and layers of NIMBYs. The big selling point of the deal was the state government ensuring Amazon would have a campus that could hold 25,000 people.
Whatever growth occurs in NY will be organic. Not government-subsidized hyper-growth which can throw things out of whack.
Real growth brings with it real increases in public funding, that can be used to fund real increases in infrastructure demands and demands on other public services.
When a local government has to bribe their way into increasing local business, they tip the scales in favor of one thing (i.e. jobs) while burdening other things (tax base, transit support, etc.)
When companies choose to do business in your area—because it's naturally the best place for them—it functions as a market verification that you're doing something right.
This.
That's exactly why what's now going to happen in NYC is what should happen in all cases. Wish we could get this going in Wisconsin.
It's not going to be organic. Instead, these same deals are going to be spread out to a bunch of other companies, most of which will pay less than Amazon on average and the "subsidies" will take longer to be a net positive.
Again, people confuse bribes with standard deals. Any company is eligible to receive the tax breaks that Amazon was going to. So New Yorkers have really "won" here. Same subsidies paid out to lower paying companies at a significant slower scale and significantly less economic upside.
There's no way to turn this into a positive here.
Only if you assume those other companies collectively hold the same bargaining power that Amazon did, which is an assumption I can't agree with
The biggest aspect of this deal for Amazon was reduced regulatory burden. That was Amazon's actual goal here, the tax offsets were just the icing that every company is going to end up getting by making a major move like this.
I dunno. It seems like an unambiguous positive to me. The giveaway to Amazon was enormous -- so much so that it seems extremely dubious that New York would ever have been able to recoup that money, let alone increase it.
Add on to the fact that if you sold that one car for $25K, you end up with other people who would've paid $30K but now want that same discount, so you may have given away a lot more than $5K.
Well, if you believe Amazon coming to NY was good, it's no more negative or positive than me not winning the lottery today, and I didn't buy a ticket either.
Predicting the future is hard and counterfactuals are tricky, so we may never know which choice was better.
The commodity these days is skilled workforce. Amazon will still be where they can get that commodity, economic incentives aren't needed. Cash is not the limiting factor it is the people they need. It was a smart business move to try to extract some cash too but they did not need that to expand in NY.
There are skilled workforces outside of NY, believe it or not. And they aren't going to go through the regulatory burdens to expand NY to a major campus, since that's really what this was about.
To be clear, since this point is being missed by so many people: This wasn't a special deal outside of the reduced regulatory burden. Any company that meets the eligibility requirements will get these exact same "subsidies".
What happened here is a bunch of local politicians and local people who are absolutely clueless about how corporate tax reductions work pushed against something that's still going to happen just, at least potentially, not with a high paying company like Amazon.
I'm not so sure that people are actually missing this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19165374
The grants are all based on the size of the deal, and the reason this one was so large is because the number of employees was so large.
Interesting if true, but I don't think people are going to accept it on your say-so. I recommend digging up a citation.
Is there an article the explains this?
They did a vastly superior job than I could do.
Really? Let look at what was offered:
1 $897 million from the city’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) and
2 $386 million from the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP)
3 $1.2 billion in “Excelsior” credits
4 $505 million in a capital grant
Yes the first 3 are existing programs. But the idea that those sums or anything remotely close to them would simply be made available to any company moving to NY is comical at best. Now lets look at number 4, a 505 million dollar capital grant. That's a pure giveaway compliment of the tax payer. And let's remember that both the city and state governments put together dedicated teams to find this money for Amazon. This was in addition to the work the city and state did for give Amazon data, such as "detailed information on the availability of machine-learning specialists, user-experience designers and hardware engineers."[1]
There is no way any of this is available to "any company moving to NY."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/technology/amazon-new-yor...
> $897 million from the city’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP)
That works out to $35,880 per employee that Amazon promised. Per the REAP program website[1], the credits available are $3000 per employee for 12 years. That actually works out to slightly more per employee ($36,000). So yes, any company not currently in NYC that creates 25,000 jobs in one of the designated areas would get the $897MM in benefits.
> $386 million from the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP)
ICAP is a property tax abatement available to any company willing to redevelop qualifying properties[2]. The value of the abatement is based on the final value of the property and which benefit schedule[3] it qualifies for. Any company willing to put in the same amount of redevelopment in one of the designated areas as Amazon was will get the same abatement value.
> $1.2 billion in “Excelsior” credits
I don't have the time at the moment to calculate how this was arrived at, but looking at the overview of credits available[4] it appears to follow similar formulas as the NYC programs.
In short, I do not see it as "comical" by any measure that any company offering to create 25,000 new jobs and redevelop hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property in designated areas would get these same values. Amazon didn't get these numbers because they were Amazon, but because of the scale of what they proposed to do. Whether that is a good idea to offer to any company is open for debate.
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/business-reap.pag...
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/benefits-industri...
[3] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/finance/downloads/pdf/icap/icap_...
>"In short, I do not see it as "comical" by any measure that any company offering to create 25,000 new jobs and redevelop hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property in designated areas "
It sounds like you aren't familiar with NYC. Long Island City has long since been "developed." That building boom started 18 years ago. The volume and velocity of luxury high rises appearing across the East River has been incredible. LIC does not need to be "redeveloped" nor is it some basket case "designated" area that requires incentives and credits to build there.
First of all, these jobs were all white collar. Amazon's current new grad SDE's in NY and SF both have more than $150k in comp. New grads.
Second, the food delivery people for Amazon Fresh are employees of Amazon. The Amazon Flex drivers is what you are talking about, and there is no "mandatory" tip for that service. What you're talking about is something Instacart and DoorDash was doing. Those are entirely different companies.
Down voting because you dislike Amazon isn't a valid reason.
It is also amusing that you consider Amazon's assertion about the job count an iron truth of what would have happened. While Amazon does not have Foxconn's long history of scamming municipalities, there is also no reason to weight their words any higher than other companies who have played this game in the past, and the odds look significantly worse than a sure thing viewed that way.
Finally, the way you win these games is not to play, no different than the continual sports stadium scams or other "let's you and him fight" grifts.
It corrodes discussion badly, and we're trying to stave off that decline here.
In this context, they're referring to the actions of NY (not the comment they're replying to), and TBH, there's nothing personally acidic; it's just a saying.
Moderators have to make these calls. From my perspective this is no different from what we've done thousands of times.
And often when I get votes, there's no signal whether it's due to tone, or content, or whether it's because I'm expressing something that is true, but makes people feel sad (seems to happen a lot, makes no sense to me).
Dan was spot on when saying that this acidity compounds. It leads to a vicious circle of increasingly hostile comments unless someone decides to be the bigger person and break the chain. Having a neutral third party step in to play this role (i.e. a moderator) makes this chain-breaking far more likely and works to all of our benefit.
> feel free to pat yourself on the back for not "falling for it"
is condescending?
Because to me it sounds super condescending, flippant, and dismissive.
And that's the fundamental issue with moderating rhetorical devices. You're assuming you know how the other person intended to say something.
Moderating personal attacks is easy. Because that's not a rhetorical device and it's intent is quite clear.
Anybody who thinks that through should see why it's such a terrible idea. Not even NY can "very quickly" absorb 25k people in a small area without screwing up quality of life for the people who already live there. That's a great way to make real estate prices sky rocket and screw over the existing residents. And it'll completely screw up infrastructure and transportation, because there's not enough money to pay for them when the company causing the issues is getting a huge tax break and not paying their fair share, and they're not things that can be fixed quickly in any case.
> Maybe it works out great as other companies will lease those buildings and hire a combined ~20k employees averaging $150,000 in compensation, but that's likely not going to happen.
If the current residents are qualified for $150k a year jobs then they presumably already have one - it's not like there are 25k unemployed software devs waiting around for companies to move to NY.
That whole competition was a shameful money grab by Amazon and I'm glad it didn't work out for them.
This was over a 10 year period. New York City would have absorbed this just fine. Population projections for the city over that same time span is an additional 600,000 people.
The "small area" that Amazon was relocating to (Queens) is expected to get 150,000 of those people. And we can ignore the assumption that people making 150k a year all want to live in Queens (or LIC) and not Manhattan.
Of course it can. This is New York fucking City, there are literally single buildings with that many jobs in them here.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-amazon-invasion-in-new-...
So the "value proposition" had nothing to do with access to a talent pool of qualified candidates to fill those 25K jobs? Because that would be odds with the reasons Google, FB et al have set up shop in NYC.
>"This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly."
Yet there was never any specifics of when Amazon would arrive at that mythical 25K job number. The closest you can find to any time qualification is the phrase "within a decade." I guess you have a very different idea of "quickly."
>"The fact that you (and many others) consider this a win is an attempt to revise history."
No the "win" here is not giving out corporate subsidies, more especially to a company that absolutely does not need it. NYC will be just fine without Amazon. There is no shortage of tech jobs in NYC these days. It been that way for over 10 years now.
On the other hand, smaller, not thriving cities may have indeed benefited from attracting an Amazon. But it's a bigger debate whether they would benefit more than the cost they might've had to pay to attract an Amazon.
Do we even have an example on record of a state or city making huge concessions to attract a company and it "completely reviving a city and building up a new ecosystem that funnels in new wealth and new money"?
You're suggesting that another city will generate money and wealth to rival NYC by getting a few Amazon jobs?
Frankly, that would not happen. Maybe if that other city was DC? But, yeah, probably not even then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
There is no place, in the US, that rivals the wealth and power of NYC. Now internationally, that's where you start to get your Beijing's, and your London's, and your Tokyo's, and your Monte Carlo's, and your Paris, and Shanghai's etc. But in the US it's NYC at the center of the preponderance of wealth and power. Only place in a position to make a run at NYC is DC, and they'll need a lot more than Amazon to do it.
(There's also LA and Chicago, but those cities are not as "powerful", nowhere near as wealthy, and to be frank, making a run at NYC is not their ambition.)
Does the city get back more than the 3 billion in concessions and how long does that take?
Would those new Amazon jobs cause 25k people to move to NYC? Or is it more likely to just make the local market more competitive? How would other businesses react? Would they move? Embrace remote? If they increase salary across the board and live with unfilled positions, how does that affect tax revenue? Even if those people do move, how does that influx affect people with lower paying jobs? Will they be pushed out? How does that affect tax revenues?
Those are the kinds of questions I saw raised by opponents, and it seems like there weren't clear answers to them.
Google hasn't committed to anything. Once it does, it will most likely seek the same tax benefits that Amazon did from the pre-existing programs if it qualifies
In NYC there are are tax incentive plans for relocating and hiring that companies can apply for if they qualify. Just because Google doesn’t include that portion in their announcement does not mean they won’t pursue it if they can.
A good article would be one where Google states it won’t take any tax incentives even if it qualifies for it.
Pretty widely speculated that they were going to go to NYC and VA regardless of what the other cities did & the HQ2 gambit was just meant to maximize their bargaining position with these governments
Sure there has been a housing bubble there for a decade, and I'm certain there are some real estate insiders benefiting from this arbitrage, but this kind of dysfunction can't be good for the economy.
So this whole HQ2 thing ended up being a grand waste of everybody's time.
The jobs would've been in Long-Island City, which is basically a glass tower condo ghost town with practically no office/business presence. The subway for people commuting into LIC for work is probably currently fairly empty, so the subway could accommodate them. (The same cannot be said of the reverse. Commuting from Astoria, Queens or Williamsburg, Brooklyn into Manhattan for work during rush hour is horrible).
I agree that politicians need to do a better job of accommodating those who are displaced by gentrification. NYC housing costs are insane (as someone else mentioned we undertax single-family homes and $100m penthouses), the subway is failing, etc.
Perhaps the deal would've gone through had politicians better communicated how the $3 billion subsidy package was not just a handout to Amazon but would actually improve the city and the well-being of its residents.
But given the city's failure to build affordable housing (not the "affordable housing" buzzword where luxury apartments are subsidized to low income people who enter a lottery, but doesn't actually meaningfully increase affordable housing stock) and fix the subway, maybe the city isn't capable of managing itself and stemming the pitfalls of gentrification, and so the opposition was fired up by this awareness. It seems that so long as fundamental aspects of NYC like its subway system are managed by NY State, we will never see any meaningful change at anything more than a snails-pace. Perhaps NYC should be fighting for independence from NY State to be in full control of its own destiny rather than being at the mercy of politicians in Albany with a poor track record of attending to the city's needs. (sorry I got derailed there a bit, just a stream of thought)
You seem to understand pretty well why some are not seeing this as a loss after all.
The affordable housing crisis and congestion will only be further exacerbated. Your average Queens resident who's already barely making her rent will see rents skyrocket, forcing her to move out and further into the boondocks come lease renewal time.
I think the opposition reflects a dissatisfaction with the politicians/administrators who run their city more than a hatred of Amazon.
I lived in Greenpoint and Sunnyside for 3 years ~5 years ago and either took a train from LIC into the city or through LIC. They were always busy. Just because no one is going to LIC for work doesn't mean that they don't have to use the same trains that would be used to go to LIC. The 7 is a crowded line as are the orange and blue lines that go through. The only line that wouldn't be incredibly crowded is the G, and even that isn't fairly empty going to Court as it's a popular way to get to midtown if you live near the G.
I'd say the MTA's problems around poor oversight wouldn't be magically solved by NYC taking control. For example, NYCHA was under NYC control. Sure, over the years the Federal Government has diminished funding from their side -- but that should not overshadow the contractor and union corruption that NYCHA, whose head was controlled by the City, suffered with. You don't need to re-read the headlines about the falsified lead inspections, but I probably do need to remind you that in the last couple of scandals (one involving orgies and parties in a South Bronx project, as well as clocking overtime while not being there), not a SINGLE person got fired, thanks to union protection. Rumors are an elevator repairman position pays 300K. Until recently, NO repairs were done anywhere after 4pm due to union agreements. Finally, the City is the worst landlord - racking up violations more than any private landlord could, in the worst sort of hypocritical irony. So no, I don't think so.
NYCHA was found at fault recently in a Federal lawsuit, where HUD almost took the whole thing over. You can't blame the Federal Government for that.
You probably don't want to know that all the green scaffolding that lasts years is being rented -- the money going to a private contractor. You can look this up and do the math, it's just another example of incompetence.
Next, the City is already making MTA's life harder financially, and here are two recent examples. One is, the Mayor came out against banning food on the subway because it supposedly disproportionally affects the poor. Yet, trash fires from stuff like food containers account for a sizeable fraction of the delays. Here's another. The DA stopped prosecuting subway turnstile jumping, which costs 80M a year from lost subway fares and something like 120m from lost bus fares. And prosecuting this would be racist, we're told.
Finally property taxes go up 20% a year -- at least mine do, because that's the max allowed by NY State. If NYC were running its own affairs, I can't even imagine what would happen.
They failed to implement a wider congestion charge, like they do in London and many other places, because, ahem, it, according to the Mayor, affects the poor (he said this). So now we applied a congestion charge to taxis and Ubers/Lyfts/for-hires, because the drivers are rich, right?
I could go on. Finally I'll leave you with, have a look at how many new City jobs opened up and new agencies opened up in 2018. Do you really think the City can be trusted fully owning its budget?
You're clearly right in that the NYC taking ownership wouldn't magically solve the issue. There's a bigger systemic problem here - piss poor management and complete lack of accountability. The fix isn't as simple as changing ownership since clearly these organizations are being misproperly managed regardless of whether NYC or NY State are in charge.
More drastic reform is necessary. I don't know what that looks like. Maybe we can start by giving politicians more direct control and oversight over these "public benefit corporations" that they're bankrolling.
If your property appreciating in value by 20+%/year? That's insane.
https://www.statesman.com/news/20161125/this-day-in-tech-his...
With a stadium, you only employ a relatively small number of people during the week and off-season. Staff during games and concerts are not really earning a ton of money that will create new economic activity. With Amazon, tech workers actually increase the tax base and they're spending their money at local businesses. At least with the Virginia deal, the tax breaks don't kick in until they actual create jobs at the promised salary levels.
Now I don't really agree with giving a massive private business all of these tax breaks, they can afford to expand without them if it makes business sense. The problem is that each state is competing with each other and FOMO kicks in. Without that powerful motivation companies wouldn't pull these stunts. Although eventually they'd try to pit countries against each other (which they kind of already do).
I never said it did.
However, if you really need to make a contract iron-clad in order to protect yourself (and good luck with that!), that's a very strong indication that the entity you're dealing with is untrustworthy and you shouldn't be getting into bed with them in the first place.
The problem with most major corporations (and particularly major tech companies these days) is that they are not trustworthy actors.
Cities will keep on losing this kind of battle until some form of government or policy arises to counter the power of corporations (which are de facto increasingly taking the role of governments). Under our current regulations and incentives, I'm actually glad to see Amazon flex its political capability and teach NYC a lesson in what happens when you let vocal minority dictate public policy. Let examples like this teach us how broken our laws are.
Note I am equally glad to see some day that government (federal, state) come up with policies that stop cities and states from undercutting each other to get a temporary revenue / population / popularity boost at the expense of giving away the farm just to get it (until you find out it wasn't worth it, and get to try and remember that at the next election). Or god forbid, actually create policies that in the long-term stimulate as many jobs as a corporation might in a single swoop.
I don't see any reason to prioritize the "economic base" over the people currently living there. Those things do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. They can, but often do not. Those elected officials seem, to me, to be representing the best interests of the people who voted for them. What's best for the tax base of a certain geography is often at odds with the people currently living somewhere.
No one lived there until very recently, and the people that do are rich as fuck - it's basically a discount Midtown East. The poor people who live in the nearby projects came out strongly in _favor_ of Amazon opening up and lobbied the city hard - turns out Amazon also needs janitors, cafes etc.
I think a lot of people get so caught up in hating on tech workers and opposing gentrification they forget where the money comes from.
It’s become very stylish to rage against corporations. I wish people would take a more rational point of view. We shouldn’t be hating on successful businesses for fun.
Edit: also, I’m not sure, but isn’t the $3B a reduction in taxes Amazon would have paid? So it’s not like NY had that money to begin with. It’s jist a reduction in what they would receive.
Ref: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/amazon-...
Include all taxes from 25,000 employees + their families (property taxes, sales taxes, etc), and it's a very likely $4.5 to $5 billion over ten years to state & local coffers from the employees.
And that's just the direct benefits. It excludes any taxes Amazon corporate would pay, such as property taxes on any real-estate they buy over that ten years. It also ignores the potential for additional expansion in that ten years (Amazon will more than double in size over that time, to half a trillion dollars plus in sales, I'd bet on more than 25k employees).
It would have easily paid for itself, which was actually never in dispute. People didn't like it regardless of the fact that it would have paid for itself. They disliked the idea of giving Amazon anything.
The other issue is that this is assuming literally all 25k employees would be new residents of NY. Assuming this is true (which it probably wouldn't be), that also means that the city needs to maintain infrastructure for at least 50k new residents (probably more like 75k assuming an average family size of 3). That's not an insignificant amount of new people who require public services.
Regardless, ($14k * 25k * 10 = $3.5B). Not that much more than the initial tax rebate, and not accounting for any additional costs to the city. Also assuming that the rate of tax-paying by employees remains consistent, and that they don't cut any staff in HQ2, which is far from certain.
As to:
Property taxes on real-estate owned by AMZN
Amazon already has an office in NYC. If they want to expand in NYC they can. Amazon growing in NYC is not at all predicated on the existence of HQ2. The only probable reason Amazon would continue to expand in NY specifically would be for more tax breaks. Which kinda defeats the argument that "Amazon will grow and we can collect more taxes".
Seems like an clean net positive for the city even viewed in the shallowest of accounting terms. This doesn't include the positive network effects of encouraging the future growth of Amazon and other tech companies in the area.
What if Amazon decides they only need 10k employees in "HQ2" after 5 years?
Better bird in hand than two in the bush.
NY needs to focus on improving infrastructure now, which is the only guaranteed thing that will promote growth in the long term. And to do that, NY needs to be 1. less corrupt and 2. not give giant tax breaks to corporations that already have offices in the city.
Yes, maybe Amazon HQ2 will be a net positive 10 years down the road, but NY should focus on fixing its broken subway system and other structural issues so that the city can actually support 10 Amazons in 10 years. And HQ2 literally did the opposite of that (increasing ridership while decreasing revenue in the short term is not how you improve infrastructure, surprisingly).
And like other commenters pointed out, the state still makes money through payroll taxes, sales tax, property tax, etc.
I agree that the politicians should have made it more clear that the additional tax revenue would be used to fix urgent problems like the failing subway, poverty, etc.
Amazon would not even have been one of the top 20 employers in the city and finance would still be the most important economic sector by far.
It would have been a big deal for LIC, but not for NYC.
When someone says it's destroyed, they mean it's gentrifried or exclusionary, not benefiting everyone equally. That's certainly true. Economically the fact is Seattle has been an epic boom city for two decades now.
Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway also don't benefit everyone equally. 99.9% of the world can't live there, few of the planet's 7.5 billion people are welcome. It turns out that all nice, affluent places are aggressively exclusionary, without exception.
2021: After hitting 2020 growth targets, Amazon quietly lays off 5000
It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.
https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program https://esd.ny.gov/startup-ny-program
I mean, I think it's great if there's now budget to increase support for small businesses.
2. New York already has a lot to offer in terms of labor market, real estate for employees, and access to capital markets. Did Amazon really need incentives to want to be in NYC?
3. No huge loss for either party. NYC doesn't need Amazon, and Amazon can make the little people dance for them somewhere else.
It's just like anything, you might benefit from the price you pay but you might have been able to get it cheaper.
The problem with subsidies is that they needlessly cost money in a zero-sum competition between cities. It was always clear that Amazon would build somewhere. A race to the bottom competition over the exact location leaves everyone but them worse off than the alternative, which is coordinating to refuse to engage in it, like any sane economy like the EU does.
EDIT: Apparently there were limits placed on 120 landings a year and it was on the waterfront campus mitigating some of the safety concerns. It was still a major concession given though that does nothing I can think of to add to the community.
And it was dumb for Amazon to seek out subsidies anyway. Amazon only needed one criteria to have a successful HQ2: A willingness to accommodate new housing demand. $3B in subsidies would be dwarfed by the increase in salaries from higher costs of living. If a city can allow housing to be built, and keep up with Amazon's hiring demand to keep housing prices flat, that alone would be worth far more than any city or state could ever hand over to Amazon in subsidies.
Everyone's moving to more comfortable places with lower costs of living. NYC is not an attractive place for job candidates unless those candidates are already in NYC. Even companies with a strong presence in NYC are expanding in places like Nashville, Omaha, Dallas, Denver, etc. rather than in NYC.
At some point, New Yorkers ought to ask themselves why everyone wants to move to these nice midwestern cities.
I think more and more tech workers are going to wake up to the fact that while mega-city life can be cool, it's not the only way to live.
I think there is something to be said about early career people rushing to NY and not realizing how much 80k really is, though. Schools should really have a class for all majors that just goes over how you calculate and compare cost of living and put a price on benefits, including the intangible benefits like having other employers you could move laterally among without planning to uproot and go 1000 miles away.
Job-wise, the NYC tech market is as good as ever.
Consider that your perspective might be skewed because people in lower COL areas tend to be those who place more emphasis on COL?
Not sure why you chose the midwest as a qualifier here - out of all the cities you listed, only Omaha would be considered a midwestern city.
Out of the 15 fastest growing cities according to the Census, almost none of them are in the midwest [1] (Only one really: Columbus). Admittedly it's over a short time span.
Also: #5 is LA, a city I don't think anyone would consider to be low cost of living.
The real story is that the south (+ Texas, depending on what you consider Texas) seems to be growing rapidly, not the midwest.
1: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...
It's actually pretty important, because the crux of your argument is that they're moving to places with much a lower CoL. If people are moving from NYC to LA/Seattle/etc., your argument doesn't really hold much water.
> or you could take my point that there is a reason why people are moving out of places like NYC in favor of less dense cities that don't smell like urine.
Where are you getting that information from? As far as I can tell, NYC has had about a 6% population growth since 2010. It actually matches the US overall population growth pretty well, which is pretty impressive for what is far and away the most populated city in the country.
Gee, I don't remember mentioning "LA/Seattle/etc." by name. Unlike some other cities that I mentioned by name. Did you see the part where I mentioned cities by name?
> As far as I can tell, NYC has had about a 6% population growth since 2010. It actually matches the US overall population growth pretty well
Great, now compare that to the growth rates of Dallas or Nashville or etc.
In the end all they proved was this kind of stuff should just stay in the backroom. And good paying tech jobs stay on the coasts.
They likely could have avoided it if they had just selected one of the dark horses like Indianapolis or Saint Louis.
The process was anything but transparent. "Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders": https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headqua...
But NYC is on the coast. What do you mean by this?
I wonder if this is to let some of the news cool, work behind the scenes with some of the previous offers, then surprise announcement down the road.
Weird.
I remain unconvinced that they care about local politicians' angry takes on their campus (who they probably expected to hate it in the first place).
ask the state government, who's happy to give Amazon the tax break but not nearly so happy to fund the agencies running its largest city's transit.
But I didn't like the big tax breaks, and as a taxpayer of the city I'm glad my money won't go towards subsidizing the expansion of one of the world's most valuable companies.
It's too bad Amazon wasn't willing to pay their fair share.
This isn't internal information, you can look it up on the career page.
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?offset=0&result_limit=10&s...
Why should something that vaguely amounts to an arbitrage situation be free?
The fact that that's all you can think about ...
is exactly why people are starting to lose their love for Big Tech in general.
It is when you're not considering the adverse effects on others. And when you're already doing quite well enough, as it is.
This was all covered in a Planet Money episode[2], so you can listen/read it and make your own decision, but if it's true, it seems a shame that New York was denied what should be a favorable outcome because of FUD, spite for Amazon/Bezos because they are large, or some combination thereof.
1: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/multipliers.pdf (Note: I haven't read this, but I tracked down the most likely source for the reference as I got it from [2])
2: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
NYC could've had Amazon, even with decent tax breaks, but the government just went too far without the support of its constituents.
You actually think that's going to happen?
This may have already happened, it's really hard to say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
Jay Foreman does another great video on the very weird situation with the House of Lords:
Edit: I did a bit of research below, and 4% definitely does not seem accurate. I have no idea where the source for that 4% was :/
That's extremely common for local elections. For all the talk of money in politics, neither party could afford to fund opponents in every district.
> With 98 percent of precincts reporting as of Wednesday, the State Board of Elections shows 27,826 registered Democrats cast votes in Tuesday’s primary in New York’s 14th District. With 235,745 registered Democrats as of April, according to the BOE, this comes out to a turnout of around 11.8 percent.
NYT shows roughly 150,000 votes in the 14th precinct for the actual election: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/new-york-house-dis...
The population of the district is around 712,000 https://ballotpedia.org/New_York%27s_14th_Congressional_Dist...
So, the actual percentage is indeed higher than 4%. Even still, it's quite low.
The number of votes cast in New York's 14th Congressional District election, 2018 was 141,122: https://ballotpedia.org/New_York%27s_14th_Congressional_Dist...
That's approximately 20% of the total population. I can find no info on what percentage of that 691,715 is eligible voters, but the 4% claim appears pretty ridiculous.
We’d get the most pro-business candidate every time. Not that any candidate has been anti/business, but can you imagine, it’d be pro-business on steroids. Schultz, One of the Waltons, corporate raiders?
I think it gets complicated but the decision had merits, I think. Obvs, the SCOTUS believes it did.
In the case, the conservative non-profit organization Citizens United sought to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts shortly before the 2008 Democratic primary election in which Clinton was running for U.S. President.
The federal law, however, prohibited any corporation (or labor union) from making an "electioneering communication" (defined as a broadcast ad reaching over 50,000 people in the electorate) within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate at any time. The court found that these provisions of the law conflicted with the United States Constitution.
They were prohibited from airing ads 30 days before the election. The decision in terms of effects and scope was terrible. It was a broad decision and had a very wide effect.
The repercussions may be wider than anticipated or liked, but the decision to not allow them to advertise and show it because it wasn’t by an established entity seems spurious.
>In response, Citizens United produced the documentary Celsius 41.11, which is highly critical of both Fahrenheit 9/11 and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The FEC, however, held that showing the movie and advertisements for it would violate the Federal Election Campaign Act, because Citizens United was not a bona fide commercial film maker.
If the relentless (Media) attacks of DJT are an indication, there are few "outsiders" who are going to get involved in the future. And isn't that exactly what status quo'ers like the DNC and GOP want?
Consider the possibility that he isn't being attacked. That his actions/statements are being reported on. That what you call an attack is indicative of the nature of the man. When you cause George Will to leave the party then....
My benchmarks are these:
1) The USA went to War in Iraq over over lie. Thousands died, gazillions were spent, etc. as a result of that lie. The Media barely noticed. People who believe Trump is the worst thing ever clearly never understood who and Dick Cheney was. Trump is a pussy cat compared to Cheney.
2) Not only did BHO renew the (so called) Patriot Act but he expanded its depth & breadth. The Snowden revelation also came to light on Obama's watch. Again, the Media barely noticed. Real journalists would find both of these troubling. Instead, BHO was our first BuzzFeed POTUS.
--
I am by no mean a fan of DJT but the truth is nothing he has done to date comes close to either one of those. He's got __a lot__ of work to do to top either one of those. The Media is bending over backwards to discredit DJT because:
1) It's a favor to the DNC. It lets the DNC off the hook because ppl are too distracted to ask the DNC what should be asked. That is: "How negligent and incompetent do to have to be to lose to DJT? And what heads are going to roll for your debacle? We want names!!!"
2) The GOP doesn't like him either. He stepped in on their dance, made all their candidates look like the fools that they are, and made it to the Whitehouse. That's not how it works.
3) Neither party wants to see another outsider do what DJT did, and they will, by any means necessary, make sure it doesn't happen again any time soon.
4) Trump is good for the Media's business. They love the "outrage". They love the "controversy." As long as it draws eyes and clicks - cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-chaig - they're happy. The media finally discovered that giving Bush #2 and Obama free passes didn't help pay their bills. For the Mainstream Media DJT is like printing money.
That is the context. That's how W.DC operates.
George Will has been a solid conservative for decades and written numerous books lauded by conservatives. Consider the possibility that it was precisely his integrity that caused him to abandon the party. Perhaps it's possible that Trump represents a part of the party that a reasonable person with some sense of moral and intellectual consistency wants nothing to do with. How far right does the party have to go before you will question the state of affairs? Trump called Ted Cruz a liar. He implied Jeb Bush is a wimp. He implied that Ted Cruz's wife is ugly. He implied that Rand Paul is ugly. He said that McCain is a loser because he was a POW. He was a loser for getting captured. Trump agreed that his own daughter is a nice piece of ass. This was on the Howard Stern Show. How far does the man have to go to lose credibility in your eyes?
To be fair, was he wrong? How many career politicians do you know that aren't liars, especially Republicans?
>He implied that Ted Cruz's wife is ugly.
Again, to be fair, I just did a google search and he's not wrong, IMO. Yes, it's in poor taste to make remarks like that, but Trump is a populist, so he's basically playing the "I call it like I see it" card, which gets votes from his base.
>How far does the man have to go to lose credibility in your eyes?
The things you're complaining about are positives in the eyes of Trump voters. That seems to be the problem you're having with understanding. They don't want another regular politician; this is why populists come to power now and then. It seems to me that the biggest problem that both parties have, and is shown by your post here, is a completely inability to comprehend the appeal of someone like Trump to low-information, low-class voters.
If we had an alternative voting system (there are several good ones), people could actually vote _for_ someone rather than just _against_ someone, and there would be some criteria for voting other than who can put out the most inflammatory campaign commercials.
But again, the status quo would never go for it, and I suspect most voters wouldn't go for a system that can't be explained on a bumper sticker. I'm not trying to insult the intelligence of the average voter, just their attention spans.
Oh, I really think it could.
So basically a "house of lords" for America, but instead of bishops and lords it's tech CEOs and celebrities? :)
Things like Uber, AirBNB, even Google Waymo are all examples of this.
And lest I forget to mention the lobbying that happens everyday.
https://nypost.com/2019/02/12/majority-of-new-yorkers-want-a...
It irks me to no end that our system is set up to reward the largest and the wealthiest.
NYC should have prepared a package for Amazon and said "this is what we'll guarantee in breaks to small business owners if you come here".
I didn't even think it was a particularly bad deal all things considered, I just hate the idea.
Meanwhile, half of NYC and the country is wondering what NYC will do without 25,000 jobs. Or before that, wondering how the housing market could possibly bear it.
25,000 people, a ton of whom were already living in NYC (thats why they wanted to come) was going to be barely a ripple.
The whole thing was a sham. People were way overstating the affect it'd have, and NYC needs better subways, not more tech jobs (or both in conjunction).
I could give a shit about 25,000 potential AWS employees.
In terms of impact on a regular residents life at least.
In my opinion, the type of special treatment that New York offered Amazon is fundamentally anti-democratic and just plain wrong.
Sounds like a negotiating tactic, to encourage residents in support of the campus to put pressure on their representatives in government.
The "politicians" are upset, because their constituents are upset. Amazon, attempting to turn the tables is an interesting tactic - sort of a reverse psychology. I wonder if it will work.
It would be absolutely ridiculous and absurd if they decide to come back, just because the narrative between officials and constituents changed.
Honestly, them coming back to NYC wouldn't be any less of a shit show then the process of them coming to NYC.
While I'm skeptical about this claim about 70% of NYers supporting this, if it's true, then they should do a better job of voting.
I did however love the protester's signs:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/14/nyregion/14nyamaz...
The only person who successfully circumvented NYC politics was Mike Bloomberg, and that was solely a result of his personal charity giving over $600 million in donations to different community orgs and non-profits over the course of his mayoral tenure.
Does anybody think that Amazon pulling out of NYC will make their impact on the DMV greater or would it probably be the same as if they had HQ2's both places?
Yeah. It sounds odd, but it's certainly not crazy / wrong.
But to save face, AMZN now has to pull out of NYC that has a great pool of talent.
Wait, where'd Nashville come from? I thought the choices before were NoVa and NYC?
Have you been there this year? It was -26F without the wind chill a couple of weeks ago.
Come for the cold weather and stay for the high taxes and high housing prices on the St. Paul side. Also, traffic is going to be fun on the west side for a couple of years.
Ocasio-Cortez, Gianaris, van Bramer...?
If we want to create jobs, we don’t need a giant corporation using our tax money to help organize this human activity. We can hire each other for our own local purposes.
If we want to keep NYC rich then we don’t exploit the labor of the local population to send money out of the city.
The biggest US export by far is Dollars, ever since Bretton Woods they are in demand all around the world. We trade them for stuff others make. It has made Americans lazy and fat.
Do you really want jobs? Like race-to-the-bottom Amazon warehouse slave jobs? Is that the goal of humans? No. It’s just fed to them.
Donald Trump said he’ll keep the jobs in this country. Bernie said he’ll keep the money in this country by preventing corporations and billionaires from offshoring it through loopholes.
I know which goal I’d prefer, if I wanted Americans to be the masters and not the slaves. (I happen to believe that money going to poorer areas is good, so I don’t hold that nationalistic position - but if I did, I would want the money to stay, not jobs.)
Big loser here is New York City.
Amazon will get its tax break somewhere else.
Looks like we’ve reached our “Gettysburg” moment against corporate welfare. Terrible years of war still left, but the tide has turned.
But fewer Foxconn style deals and race to the bottom HQ2 publicity stunts would be great for everyone (except the mega-corps).
As for "being pushed further and further out", that again is the voter's own fault for not voting better. They don't need to move farther out, they need to build more densely, and they don't do it. This is largely an American problem because for some reason, Americans associate dense residential areas with "slums" and think that only suburbs with McMansions with gigantic and useless lawns can possibly be "nice".
https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...
"After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens. For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.
We are disappointed to have reached this conclusion — we love New York, its incomparable dynamism, people, and culture — and particularly the community of Long Island City, where we have gotten to know so many optimistic, forward-leaning community leaders, small business owners, and residents. There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams.
We are deeply grateful to Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and their staffs, who so enthusiastically and graciously invited us to build in New York City and supported us during the process. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have worked tirelessly on behalf of New Yorkers to encourage local investment and job creation, and we can’t speak positively enough about all their efforts. The steadfast commitment and dedication that these leaders have demonstrated to the communities they represent inspired us from the very beginning and is one of the big reasons our decision was so difficult.
We do not intend to re-open the HQ2 search at this time. We will proceed as planned in Northern Virginia and Nashville, and we will continue to hire and grow across our 17 corporate offices and tech hubs in the U.S. and Canada.
Thank you again to Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and the many other community leaders and residents who welcomed our plans and supported us along the way. We hope to have future chances to collaborate as we continue to build our presence in New York over time."
This has happened with Amazon, Casinos, GE, The Olympics, F1 racing... cities need to not be so fucking desperate to sell out their residents to the highest bidder.
I'd be more amenable to a property tax increase than any of this garbage.
It's simple negotiation; you may lose some money on that one deal, but you'll gain more in the end by not decreasing the value of all subsequent deals.
Obviously the truth is that there are bad aspects of a race to the bottom as well as positive attributes. Finding the balance requires nuance and grace by the leaders who navigate these uncertain waters.
It's almost like taxing easily-moveable economic activity is a bad idea.
A lot of what makes NYC great (like the 24/7 public transit system, the best in the country) costs serious money to operate. You need to get that money from tax revenue.
And businesses aren't actually easily-movable, not at all.
Most of which were present there because they set up a long time ago. The current environment makes it so that you pretty much have to get a discount to make it worth starting there, per the famous reddit comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/9wploz/ocasiocortez_bl...
>And businesses aren't actually easily-movable, not at all.
"Where they decide to locate new offices" is.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/16/668769284/epis...
Kansas City is at least a well known name in the tech world now, when there's plenty of other midwest cities of similar size that rarely get brought up.
Millions would be a steal for the revenue becoming a tech hub would bring in. Even if it does take a more than a decade to be realized.
Cities of similar size: Albuquerque, Milwaukee, Louisville, Oklahoma City (and more).
Out of these, Kansas City comes up more often tech wise. I waste a good bit of time on sites like this discussing tech related matters, and not once have I read an article involving any of these cities.
This is why I said well known and on the map, not 'popular'.
1. $2.988 billion in state/city subsidies (so ~$48,000 per job)
2. The state estimated that Amazon will generate $27.5 billion in state and city revenue over 25 years, a 9:1 ratio of revenue to subsidies.
Using the numbers above, we can calculate that the state would break even in roughly 3 years if they're correct.
[0]https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/16/18098589/amazon-hq2-nyc-que...
The alternative, as is being demonstrated, is that you simply don’t get that business, and you lose out. x% of $0 is $0.
No. Not "new business". "A" new business. It's a sweetheart deal for one company in particular subsidized by the taxpayers. They're not reducing their citywide tax rate to attract Amazon, they're just giving a handout directly to Amazon.
What you're describing is nothing close to the reality. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Cities that participate in this scheme take turns screwing each other over in an attempt to get a minor benefit themselves, but compared to the scenario where nobody played the game to begin with, they all lose.
That said the system could be changed and laws written to prevent subsidies all together. Then competition for large workforces would be based on other factors.
If you're tired of $24 pizza consider the cabbie serving south asian places along 21st street, they're fantastic, and yes they're still there.
If you stop seeing the tax payments as entitlements, it begins to be a lot easier to reason about.
LIC was a perfect location to recruit folks whose easy commutes from Brooklyn to Google were going to be complicated.
Note that Amazon did not provide projections on economic impact or tax revenues or other aspects here. The city and state made those promises, based on economic analyses they commissioned (and likely used in their negotiations). It includes things like taxes from the additional jobs and businesses that will be created outside of Amazon.
All but $505m of the ~$3b in subsidies here would have come from programs that already existed in NY State and NYC (Excelsior, ICAP, and REAP). Would you give up $3b over 10 years (and just $505m above programs that are broadly available) to attract business that will provide an incremental $28B in new tax revenue and $186B in GSP over 25 years? That is a _tremendous_ ROI, the kind that typically does not exist in the market, and a $505m capital grant (the primary Amazon-specific concession) was a small price to secure it. The 9:1 return they projected on this deal was the best such program NY State and NYC would have ever run, and possibly the best such deal ever across the country. To put it into context, the Film Tax Credit program had a 1.15:1 ROI.
We can argue all day about whether the HQ2 search was a bluff or sham or whatever, but there is no reasonable claim to certainty here - and hence negotiation enters the picture to turn something uncertain (Amazon MAY come to NYC) into certain (Amazon WILL come to NYC).
Here are the quotes from the original HQ2 press release on the economic benefits:
> The construction is expected to create an average of 1300 direct construction jobs annually through 2033. Overall, the project is estimated to create more than 107,000 total direct and indirect jobs, over $14 billion in new tax revenue for the State and a net of $13.5 billion in City tax revenue over the next 25 years. The project provides a 9:1 return on investment.
> According to an economic impact study by REMI, Inc., a world leader in dynamic forecasting and policy analysis, the Amazon project will generate over $186 billion in Gross State Product for the New York State economy over the initial 25 years. REMI also projects over $14 billion in total new tax revenue for the State (in 2019 dollars), with annual revenues growing from $10.8 million in 2019 to nearly $1 billion in 2043. The City forecasts $13.5 billion in total new tax revenue.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-and-mayor-de...
The ROI here is well beyond any other conceivable option. It is so large that even if projections of a 9:1 ROI are way off, it would be a big win. Also, most of the subsidy to Amazon is not an up-front lump sum. Rather, most of it takes the form of credits for prior actions. For example, they would get tax credits for job creation in the prior year incrementally, based on what they actually delivered.
Taking all this into account, this would have been a super safe path to greater tax revenues, which would have improved the city/state as a whole. I hope as a next step Amazon considers cities in other parts of the country, away from blue coastal cities. Economic revitalization across a broader slice of the political/ideological/cultural spectrum can only be a good thing.
This whole thing is beyond stupid, no aspect of this model works for anyone. Just stop.