5 ms·

We should be extremely critical of the sweetheart corporate giveaways and if the Amazon project had gone forward I'm sure it would have had more then it's share

• throwawaysea 6y ago
  The Amazon subsidy was entirely based on previously shown results, meaning that Amazon would have only received breaks if they had created jobs in the prior year or had made particular investments already. The city and state would not be making ahead-of-time investments due to how they structured it. I think that's fine and protects the public's interest sufficiently. It's also worth noting that a substantial portion of the Amazon deal was through existing city/state programs like Excelsior, ICAP, and REAP (the article goes over those), which other companies can also try to get qualification for. Personally, I don't think subsidies should be banned, because public agencies must be allowed the freedom to make smart business decisions when the opportunities arise. The one danger I see is that big corporations that can navigate the legal and political landscape may have better access to these deals than a smaller player, which stifles competition. To fix that, my suggestion is that any subsidy deal should also be made available in some smaller scaled-down form to smaller competitors.