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I still remember the circus around HQ2 and how so many politicians (most prominently AOC) were dragged in the media and online forums for not bowing down to Ama

• munk-a 3y ago
  Businesses need to operate somewhere - if local governments stand strong we all win. If your local government caves to the wave of lobbying cocktail parties and PAC money injection, please vote them out. The costs we levy on businesses to operate in the US are extremely affordable and fair - giving them further discounts and rebates does nothing but enrich investors.
  • LightBug1 3y ago
    There is no 'stand strong' when the federal system encourages competition. Maybe that's a good thing. But specifically not with regards to state subsidies. They shouldn't be competed away at the demands of business, but used with purpose. Subsidies (or anything which quacks like a subsidy) should be regulated so this nonsense doesn't happen.
    • munk-a 3y ago
      I agree entirely - these sorts of subsidies can be extremely effective at uplifting job markets by, as an example, attracting a large company to build a manufacturing plant in a specific rural area that recently lost their main employer... To NYC even something as large as HQ2 is just a drop in the employment bucket.
    • paxys 3y ago
      Yup. It's crazy that you can be a business operating in a certain jurisdiction and following all the rules and the government can just decide (based on backroom deals) that your biggest competitor now needs to pay no taxes. Literally legalized corruption. At minimum all such policies need to apply uniformly across the board.
    • SrslyJosh 3y ago
      > Subsidies (or anything which quacks like a subsidy) should be regulated so this nonsense doesn't happen. 1000x this. Every news story about these subsidies eventually becomes "we gave BigCorp a $5 billion tax break and they opened a facility that employs 50 people."
  • oldpersonintx 3y ago
    [dead]
  • ueahoknof 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • hahajhiggg 3y ago
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  • fullshark 3y ago
    I can't vote anyone out, just ignoring all of this remains the optimal strategy for my own sanity.
  • Ajay-p 3y ago
    ..And theoretically that somewhere could be anywhere, even outside of the country.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • stale2002 3y ago
    > If your local government caves The local community actually wins. Sure, its easy for people in NYC and San Francisco to say that nobody should compete for any of these jobs. They are going to get them anyway. But the moment some other location tries to compete for that economic benefit, well now all of a sudden "their" jobs are being stolen by undeserving locations.
  • akavi 3y ago
    It's a shame that along with the clause against bills of attainder, banning laws that are intended to solely harm a specific individual or group of individuals, the constitution didn't also ban bills of... abtainder (?) banning laws that are intended to solely _benefit_ a specific individual or groups of individuals. Would be the best antidote to this sort of thing, but is probably untenable to amend at this point.
  • CSMastermind 3y ago
    > Businesses need to operate somewhere - if local governments stand strong we all win. This is how you end up with the Rust Belt.
    • nebula8804 3y ago
      >This is how you end up with the Rust Belt. The Rust Belt is proof positive of Big Business operating in a unrestrained environment. NAFTA, the move to China, and its ilk are a direct consequence of federal government overriding the will of the people. If there was any actual power at the local level any imports the got shipped overseas would have been slapped with tariffs. You shouldn't get unrestrained access to the largest market in the west while also ignoring the external costs.
• spamizbad 3y ago
  What's funny is she (and many other critics) specifically called out that all it would take is a single bad quarters for all those HQ jobs to evaporate and they were right.
  • nine_zeros 3y ago
    Corporate tax benefits should be tied to the number of payroll they have in that location in the quarter.
    • Aunche 3y ago
      From I understand, this is already the case for all these sort of incentive.
      • knallfrosch 3y ago
        It's mentioned in the article, even with exact numbers. What's the point of discussing this, when people don't read?
    • SrslyJosh 3y ago
      Corporate tax benefits shouldn't exist. The ones that make the news seem to be a corrupt bargain between corporations (which get huge tax breaks that the locality offering them will never recoup) and politicians (who get to campaign on "bringing jobs" or whatever while happily emptying the public coffers to make it happen).
  • TuringNYC 3y ago
    >> What's funny is she (and many other critics) specifically called out that all it would take is a single bad quarters for all those HQ jobs to evaporate and they were right. Could you elaborate on the argument here -- are you suggesting that if a job has a potential for future loss, it is just better to not create the job at all? If I was mayor, i'd be happy to take a high-paying job in my locality even if it isn't perpetual. The key would be to tie incentives to actual payroll. Subsidy disappears as soon as the job disappears. But guaranteeing perpetual jobs is something no organization can do, not even governments.
• TuringNYC 3y ago
  >> Since then Amazon has leased a ton of office space in NYC (including a large chunk of Hudson Yards, which is the priciest new development) and is expanding its presence in the city, all without the $6B+ in subsidies that Virginia and other states/cities across the country promised them. Funny how that works. I want to be fair here -- HQ2 was being discussed before the pandemic when office space was at a premium. We are now post-pandemic, where office space in major cities sit empty, languishing, and sometimes entire buildings going bankrupt with no equity value left. Of course Amazon is able to easily rent tons of office space in NYC _now_.
  • paxys 3y ago
    The expansion happened in 2019 (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/amazon-to-lease-space-in-manhattan-less-than-a-year-after-hq2-fallout.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/amazon-to-lease-space-in-man...).
  • BoiledCabbage 3y ago
    > I want to be fair here -- HQ2 was being discussed before the pandemic when office space was at a premium. Which if office space was at a premium, then that means there was way more demand then there was supply. Meaning there is no reason to be paying people to move into this premium, high-in-demand product. All the more proof that her and others saying the same thing were correct.
    • TuringNYC 3y ago
      >> Which if office space was at a premium, then that means there was way more demand then there was supply. Meaning more people want it than the amount available. Meaning there is no reason to be paying people to get this premium high in demand product. All the more reason that her and others saying the same thing were correct. The argument was the subsidies were going to be to build new office space in Long Island City in Queens, where there weren't many jobs. As a former Brooklyner, this seemed like a huge positive to me. Imagine not having to move to the West Coast for FAANG jobs! (Obviously this has substantially changed with the pandemic and FAANG jobs distributing across the coasts post pandemic)
• woooooo 3y ago
  Amazon needs NYC more than NYC needs Amazon. Amazing that so many supply-and-demand aficionados couldn't see that.
• aetherson 3y ago
  I mean, it's not like NYC didn't give Amazon tax credits for their recent expansions in NYC. For example: https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/amazon-gets-124-million-tax-break-for-new-york-warehouse https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/amazon-gets-1... And it's not like Amazon has brought nearly as many jobs to NYC as they planned to with HQ2. This isn't necessarily to say that the calculus was wrong here -- New York is perhaps uniquely a place that doesn't really need a huge influx of Amazon jobs. But I think a lot of people misunderstood the HQ2 process as like "this was a unique and rare situation in which a local government applied tax incentives to get a corporation to open a major facility there." It wasn't. That's very routine. What was unique and rare about the HQ2 process was how public it was.
  • paxys 3y ago
    NY != NYC
• bottle_roket 3y ago
  Yeah NYC doesn’t need to offer subsidies because it already has what Amazon wants, lots of highly educated young people who want to work in tech. Most places don’t already have that (or at least not enough of it) and so it could make sense to offer short term subsidies in exchange for long term industry presence.
• ch4s3 3y ago
  > politicians (most prominently AOC) were dragged The poor people living in public housing around LIC overwhelmingly favored the project which was going to bring new public spaces, upgrades to schools, and affordable housing. None of that got built and instead the new office lease happened in Hudson Yards where none of the poor LIC residents will benefit at all. She similarly helped kill a redevelopment in Industry City that included a bunch of affordable housing and light manufacturing jobs. Those jobs didn't go somewhere else in the city.
  • CalChris 3y ago
    Long Island City is doing just fine. https://archive.is/gRA45 https://archive.is/gRA45
    • paxys 3y ago
      It's funny how the biggest complaint from residents of Long Island, Astoria, Downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg etc. is that their neighborhoods are getting gentrified and unaffordable, and on the other end politicians argue that big corporations need to be paid billions of dollars in incentives to come "save" them.
    • ch4s3 3y ago
      No one is saying that real estate development is suffering. I pointed out correctly that the original proposal included investment in public amenities and schools that aren't happening.
      • CalChris 3y ago
        You sure about that? https://patch.com/new-york/astoria-long-island-city/long-awaited-new-lic-school-be-built-near-court-square-city-says https://patch.com/new-york/astoria-long-island-city/long-awa...
        • ch4s3 3y ago
          To my knowledge and based on some additional searching, that old office building is still sitting there and construction hasn't started.
• atsmyles 3y ago
  The subsidy was not to bring Amazon to Manhattan, it was to bring Amazon to Queens. The only reasonable places to commute to it is if you lived in NYC or Long Island, so most of the subsidy would have been paid back via taxes by the people working there. This doesn't include the construction jobs, restaurant and bar businesses, and real estate taxes that would be collected in the long term after the subsidy expired. I do agree that AOC represented NJ, Connecticut, and Amazon's long term interests very well. Her district, not so much.
  • nebula8804 3y ago
    > I do agree that AOC represented NJ, Connecticut, and Amazon's long term interests very well. Her district, not so much. If you consider the fact that even before the deal fell apart people began buying up swaths of real estate in the area in preparation of pushing out her current constituents then I think she made the right move. Her people are the blue collar workers of the district. The previous rep who was the Democrats top connection to Wall Street didn't even live in the district. he lived in Virginia :talk about not representing their interests.
• vineyardmike 3y ago
  I was working for Amazon at the time, and lived in Boston. Everyone thought (naively?) that Boston was going to “win” - until Bezos bought a fancy mansion in DC. It was quite embarrassing to watch even still. I’m still proud of our local government for publicly publishing their proposal, and not offering any major concessions. The proposal was basically “we have what you want, so come get it, we’re not gunna pay you”.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    As I recall, the Boston location (Suffolk Downs) would not have been what the typical Amazon HQ worker would have envisioned as being in Boston. OK, there's some public transit but you're basically in a largely blue collar area north of the city. (So somewhat like the NYC proposal in that respect.)
• shmatt 3y ago
  It was even dumber than that. AOC is a federal representative that gave her personal opinion. She has no say on local laws, she can oppose 100% of the laws Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul sign, it doesn't mean they get cancelled, it just means she has a right to her opinion. The local board that rejected Amazon had a separate set of members that decided to vote however they voted. They are also up for election completely independently, so they would have paid the price if locals disagreed with them (maybe they did, I didnt check)
• SpaceManNabs 3y ago
  AOC was right, like she usually is. Regarless, she didn't have any decision making power in this case, only soft power.
• wnevets 3y ago
  The dumbest part of that circus is that NYC is probably the last city in the US that needs to "encourage" companies to open up shop and use its real estate.
• listenallyall 3y ago
  Hudson Yards itself received $6 billion in tax breaks and incentives. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new... The vast majority of the proposed Amazon tax breaks were longstanding, pre-existing programs that were available to any company who fulfill the requirements. Most, like REAP and Excelsior, remain available today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178187