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I don't see it as a "what can you do for me". A lot of Amazon's interest were aligned with that of many New Yorkers. Both Amazon and most New Yorkers want to ha
by bko 8y ago
I don't see it as a "what can you do for me". A lot of Amazon's interest were aligned with that of many New Yorkers. Both Amazon and most New Yorkers want to have a strong transportation system and a diverse economy that doesn't just rely on taxing bloated financial bonuses to pay for services. They also want New York to be an in-demand tech hub with a deep labor pool and be a place where people actually want to live. Cities should strive to be places where employers want to invest. We aren't talking about handing over duffle bags of money to Bezos. They agreed to offset some of NYC's exorbitant taxes and regulations that make this city hostile to many businesses. And supposedly the incentives were available to any employer of that size. The fact is that having a large Amazon hub in NYC would greatly benefit the city and its denizens
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoI'm of two minds on this issue, but: how can the city have good mass transit if there are no tax dollars to pay for it?
- BurningFrog 8y agoOne factor is that NY pays 5-10 times more than comparable cities to build its mass transit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- seanp2k2 8y agoand in return for all that money, they receive the sewage waterfall: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/penn-stations-latest-addition-a-sewage-waterfall.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/penn-stations-latest-... Honestly, why is this so hard when so much of the rest of the developed world manages to do it so well?
- Blackthorn 8y agoThe fact that NYC's transit runs 24/7 makes things really hard to fix, upgrade, change, etc.
- rhizome 8y agoYeah, I heard raw sewage flows through Penn Station so often that people aren't even surprised anymore. Not rare at all.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoAll the same, having Amazon come in with a $3B break doesn't do much to move the ball forward.
- rhizome 8y agoI'm under the impression that Amazon has never been a big taxpayer.
- ehnto 8y agoTheir employees still pay tax though. With tech wages as high as they are it is probably non-trivial amounts. 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.
- arcticbull 8y agoNY has city income tax too ranging from 2.907% to 3.876%
- C1sc0cat 8y agoAnd also make less demands on the social services
- rhizome 8y agoThe average salary was to be 150K, which I feel is likely to be well within the margin of a desire for minimization.
- sadris 8y agoThey don't make that much money. their profit margins suck.
- jamroro 8y agoNew York, the wealthiest, biggest city in the country can have good mass transit by properly spending the money it already collects. 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.
- geofft 8y agoIf skyscraper-studded Manhattan is hostile to businesses, I am really curious what a city friendly to businesses looks like....
- samstave 8y agoGraftopolis?
- webXL 8y agoIt's possible the studding of skyscrapers occurred before the hostility, right?
- geofft 8y agoSure, but Manhattan is not a ghost town either. The usual crop of employers is present, there's certainly no surfeit of supply on the commercial real estate market, etc. There are cities with mostly-empty skyscrapers and overly ambitious commercial centers. NYC isn't one of them.
- rhizome 8y agoFor the past 24 hours I've been a bit befuddled, like "Amazon would have brought sorely-needed employment to [checks notes] New York City."
- codyb 8y agoWhat? 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.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoGiven the broken nature of the subway in NYC that money would have gone to the state government and been spent on god only knows what boodongles and not on imporving transport in NYC
- mcny 8y agoEven now the upside people are apparently angry at Albany for being too focused on the city. It makes no sense to me. This is clearly not true and yet everyone panders to those people. 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?
- Melchizedek 8y agoWould it? Silicon Valley used to be a great place to live for normal people. Now it's hell for anybody who isn't rich. 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 https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1094985319575969792