But surely tax breaks vs subsidies should be calculated differently? That is, letting Amazon skip paying $2 billion in taxes over 10 years doesn't cost the city

But surely tax breaks vs subsidies should be calculated differently? That is, letting Amazon skip paying $2 billion in taxes over 10 years doesn't cost the city anything directly. So from your "purely fiscal point of view", then isn't it just the cost of the marginal person on the infrastructure and housing prices, etc, vs the taxes collected? From the article, it looks like the city may actually pay up to $500 million in a "capital grant", but I'm not sure what form the rest of the subsidies are in. That said, the article uses wording like "Ohio taxpayers sued the state after it paid the automaker DaimlerChrysler about $280 million in tax exemptions and tax credits" so my perspective might be wrong here. It just feels misleading to use the verb "paid" on tax credits to me. Like, if I bought a Tesla, and got the $7,500 tax credit, I wouldn't feel exactly like the government paid me anything. Sure it cost the government that much, in some sense, since I would have paid the government those taxes had I not been given the break, but that doesn't really apply to the Amazon case since they wouldn't have paid those taxes anyway, since they wouldn't be in that state.