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You're saying two entirely conflicting things here. You're saying "cities in the U.S., with respect to each other, are in a race to the bottom" (not that being
by rlanday 9y ago
You're saying two entirely conflicting things here. You're saying "cities in the U.S., with respect to each other, are in a race to the bottom" (not that being well-run and having low taxes is a bad thing in my opinion...), and then you said New York and San Francisco don't have to play along, presumably since they're competing on value rather than price. I think it's obvious that Amazon's not looking solely for the cheapest possible city to locate in. I suspect they were never going to choose Gary, Indiana no matter how sweet the tax incentives were.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 9y agoIt's like with PCs. HP/Lenovo/Dell/Acer sit between Apple on one hand, and unlabeled Chinese products on the other. But almost nothing differentiates them from each other. Customers don't necessarily want the cheapest product, but for everyone looking at the mid-range product, nobody is going to pay more for HP versus Dell. And that's reflected in these companies razor-thin profit margins. Cities are the same way. Between New York and San Francisco on one hand, and Gary on the other, there are dozens of perfectly fine cities and the only reason to pick one versus the other is how good of a tax deal you can get. Nobody is going to pay a significant tax premium to be in Columbus versus Raleigh.