>Is its pivot to smaller communities a way to avoid messy politics? I feel very confident there will still be "messy politics", but I think the tactical situat

>Is its pivot to smaller communities a way to avoid messy politics? I feel very confident there will still be "messy politics", but I think the tactical situation may be more favorable to Amazon in these cases. >Last year, Seattle’s city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the city’s largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and affordable housing initiatives. Even an introductory course in economics will equip someone to find a profusion of problems with this tax. Because taxes affect transactions, not entities, employees at large companies suffer relative to those at smaller companies. There is a perverse incentive for companies near the threshold to manipulate headcounts via subcontractors. And so on. Companies like Amazon absolutely should pay for the welfare of the less fortunate, but the way there is not through such rash populism. From 1993 to 2016, the Democrats have been the party of sound economic policy, and I would expect better from a blog such as CityLab which presents itself as a promoter of realistic reforms. As Krugman said it: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/varieties-of-voodoo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/varieties-of-vood... > America’s two big political parties are very different from each other, and one difference involves the willingness to indulge economic fantasies. [...] > But is all that about to change? [...] > ...as the economists warn, fuzzy math from the left would make it impossible to effectively criticize conservative voodoo. This blog post certainly didn't make me feel very optimistic.