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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> there's no question this would have been a huge win for NY.

But a loss for the US as a whole, assuming the HQ still gets built, but without special tax exemptions.

The overwhelming majority of the tax deals were/are available to other employers in the state as well. IIRC, only the land/building deal was specific and a version of that is likely to be available to whomever decides to build on the site.

Empire State Development was to award Amazon a cash grant of $325 million from taxpayers. This is corporate welfare and a kind of corruption. Congress should ban all government subsidies that are one-off and negotiated in secret with individual companies. There's an equal protection under the law issue.

As an attorney, I’m curious as to how you think a constitutional equal protection issue is at stake here. I’m unaware of any case law that would suggest so.

I'm curious why Congress has chosen not to regulate (or ban) the grant of tax incentives to companies as enticements for development; this seems to easily fall under the interstate commerce clause. All states lose out when they compete against each other in this way.

There was actually a case where the court of appeals held these types of tax breaks to violate the commerce clause, but in 2006, the Supreme Court dismissed the case on a procedural issue (that the taxpayers did not have standing). See the below article for more.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/01/the-case-for-the-case-a...

States can’t expressly discriminate against foreign (i.e., out of state) businesses, but it’s never been held that they can’t subsidize local businesses. Whether the latter amounts to the same thing as the former is an interesting academic question, but the law doesn’t yet say so.

Here's an article by a graduate of GW law arguing it could be an equal protection issue: https://taxprof.typepad.com/files/65st0033.pdf

I didn't actually read it, so I'm not sure how sound his argument is. Even if plausible, it's obviously just an article by a recent law grad and not actually the clear controlling law today.

This entire deal was incredibly poorly timed. While the national Amazon roadshow was raging on, the truth behind another high-tech government deal was being exposed. Foxconn received massive benefits from Wisconsin on the promise of manufacturing jobs, and they were equivocating right around the time of the announcement that NY might be on the shortlist.

Even if other companies were eligible for most of the deal, the fact that even a small part of it might have been specific to Amazon meant that the Foxconn story and fallout became a relevant part of the discussion

Actually no, because other locations would have given tax incentives, too. In fact, LIC wasn't even one of the highest ones by that metric. For example, Newark was offering $7bn:

https://www.seattlebusinessmag.com/business-operations/new-j...

It's also important to realize that the majority of that $3bn would have come from pre-existing programs open to any company moving to LIC.

How so? It's all state and local tax credits, not federal. How the state of NY runs its finances has no bearing on the US as a whole. It will of course be a benefit to wherever those jobs end up, but that's it.

They will just get the exemptions from the next highest bidder in the list.

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