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"Bridge To Microsoft" Gets Federal Stimulus Funds
theodp writes "Among the first to benefit from the investment in roads and bridges from Obama's stimulus plan is Microsoft, which has $20B in the bank. Local planners have allotted $11M to help pay for a highway overpass to connect one part of Microsoft's wooded campus with another. Microsoft will contribute almost half of the $36.5M cost; other federal and local money will pay the rest. 'Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates could finance this out of pocket change,' griped Steve Ellis of the Taxpayers for Common Sense. 'Subsidizing an overpass to one of the richest companies in the country certainly isn't going to be the best use of our precious dollars.' Ellis called the project 'a bridge to Microsoft,' alluding to Alaska's infamous 'Bridge to Nowhere.'" A White House spokesman said this bridge project is still under review.
Unless it is a toll road which Microsoft owns completely, there is nothing wrong with using public money to build the road.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Public works projects as a way of recovering from a recession has never worked. It didn't work for the Japanese in the 90's, they spent 10 years building roads and bridges and wondering why nothing was happening. It didn't work for us in the 30's. And it will never work.
We need to stop listening to Keynesian and socialist economists who don't have the first clue what they're talking about and are trying to give solutions based on theory instead of what's been shown to work.
You want to turn this economy around? Cut taxes to 20%, max. Reduce regulations on small businesses \ cut the red tape.
The government cannot create jobs except government jobs, and government jobs do not build an economy. All government can do is get out of the way, and keep the playing field fair for the players.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
It's Micro$oft!!!!11eleven!
Do you know how many american babies they will have to sacrifice per square inch of that road? /sarcasm
I didn't think so!
Hey... how about the view-point that Microsoft is actually paying for half of that road - which WILL NOT BE MICROSOFT PROPERTY ONCE BUILT.
Or... the fact that it appears that the community actually needs that overpass.
Easing Congestion
The city of Redmond says the overpass will relieve congestion on other streets and support a big employer in the region, though one cutting jobs lately.
Microsoft said in January that it's eliminating as many as 5,000 jobs, including some from its Seattle-area workforce of 41,480.
"This project is a mobility improvement for the area as a whole," said Lou Gellos, a spokesman for Microsoft.
An existing bridge a few blocks away is congested and a nightmare for pedestrians and bicycle riders, he said.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"This project is a mobility improvement for the area as a whole," said Lou Gellos, a spokesman for Microsoft. An existing bridge a few blocks away is congested and a nightmare for pedestrians and bicycle riders, he said.
So, we have the relatively common phenomenon that commercial development has outgrown the infrastructure. Big deal. Usually the government handles this as part of its own work, without direct commercial assistance. In this case, MSFT is offering money to help solve the problem. They deserve kudos, not punishment, since they could alternatively be lobbying/strongarming the relevant government entities to foot the bill at 100%.
Even if you hold the (inane) view that MSFT should foot the bill at 100%, they don't have the authority to just build a bridge over any highway they want. So you need some kind of legislation anyway.
Bandannarama
How much does Microsoft pay in local property taxes? I would hope they have paid in a lot more than the cost of this project. Local governments are almost always willing to make concessions to businesses that make up a large part of their tax base by contributing to property taxes, state income taxes (by providing jobs), and sales taxes (which Microsoft pays very little of, not being a retail business). I would expect them to do similar improvements for a shopping mall, why not a tech firm? If the local government is giving them a free ride on property taxes AND subsidizing this improvement, then yes, local taxpayers have a right to be pissed off. But since a good number of people in Redmond owe their livelihood to M$ either directly or indirectly, I'd expect most of the taxpayers to keep their mouths shut. Plus, doesn't this overpass benefit everybody by keeping some cars off of the main highway?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Were this any lesser company, 100% of the cost would be paid for by tax dollars. That Microsoft is contributing half is either a sginficant act of generosity on their part, or a major triumph of democracy over corporate greed and corruption. Either way, it's a victory for taxpayers.
It was a similar situation when Disneyland wanted their own exit on the I-5 in Anaheim. There were significant reasons from the taxpayers point of view to do this - it greatly improved traffic in that section of the freeway, and throughout that part of Anaheim - but Disney still ended up paying for a significant portion of the cost. (In their case, it was a damned good investment in their wholly owned subsidiary, the city of Anaheim.)
The government are not creating jobs. That is simply a side effect. They can't realistically fly over American towns in helicopters and drop dollar notes, though that would probably be as effective.
What they are doing by performing useless public works is transferring private debt to the public purse. The government borrows and spends, the spending pays off the private debts.
Deleted
You obviously don't live in the area or drive on the 40th street overpass. I do. I don't work for Microsoft, and I would use that road several times per month just in the course of travelling to various entertainment venues. What we have here is a non-story about a project that is useful, estimated to cost between 15-36M, and which Microsoft has already dropped $11M on. Show me how many Seattle businesses are willing to put extra cash of their own (in addition to tax base they already supply) on the line to dig their fancy tunnel. Oh yeah, the only people in Seattle that regularly write checks for public works are retired Microsoft employees...weird.
Real FOSS nerds would just build a catapult, a flying car, or teleporter to get across. Green engineers would have demanded that 2 UNDER-passes be built, one for humans to bicycle across, and another for critters that live in the woods to have corridors connecting their shrinking landscape. Apple or Google would plan on building light rails or trams that will eventually connect all their campuses and stores. IBM would just hire only illegal Mexican workers skilled at running across highways. Obviously Seattle isn't the most innovative regional planners they purport to be. Wimps.
... and let me tell you, this will help more than just MS. The freeways and roads in the area are actually surprisingly limited. During rush hour you can expect 3mi+ backups just to get off the freeway. The current on-ramps and overpasses for 520(which is the freeway i'm assuming this will go over) are also pretty limited. Just getting from one side to the other is a pain in the butt, and a lot of that traffic is just MS workers or their shuttles going between buildings. If all of the inter-MS traffic can be re-routed somewhere else, it frees up the roads for the thousands of residents and other workers in the area.
I live a block down the road from the Microsoft Redmond campus (it used to be 12 blocks, but they metatasized), so I walk by all this each day. But I don't work at Microsoft, so all I have is just sidewalk testimony.
The older Microsoft campus was confined to the east side of highway 520, with dozens and dozens of properties rented and scattered all over Redmond, Bellevue, and other places in the area. Lately they have been building an absolutely HUGE property just across the highway from the old campus, where they will consolidate all that rented office space.
Only 7 new buildings? When I walk by there, I can see at least 14 or 17 structures going up, but I can't tell what will be in them. Some of them are titled buildings number 97, 98, 99, and by that they mean Microsoft Redmond campus literally has that many buildings. The city of Redmond has a height limit on its buildings. I don't know the exact rules, but no skyscrapers. The Microsoft buildings are all about 4 or 5 very tall stories, so they are forced to sprawl rather than go up. When they dug the hole for it all, it seemed to be about 6-12 blocks on a side. Huge, huge hole for that 4600 car parking garage. Then they put up more of those big construction cranes than I've ever seen in such a small space - at one point they had 9 or 10 of them.
With that huge parking garage right next to the highway, they should have just let Microsoft have highway entrances directly out onto 520 and keep all that traffic off the local streets. That would make perfect sense to me. But it exits out onto NE 40th Street, which is a relatively small cross-street, which has relatively small entrance and exits to 520.
There is already a bridge across 520 between the Microsoft campuses - the NE 40th overpass and intersection with 520. Also, Microsoft has a huge fleet of hundreds of shuttle buses and cars that transfer people from point to point in the Microsoft sprawl. My reaction as a local to the idea of a car and pedestrian bridge for Microsoft is that, while it would be beneficial to the locals to keep some of the terrible Microsoft drivers off the local streets (a lot of them are from India!), Microsoft should foot the entire bill.
Ok, mod me down but this guy that you people put in charge is a socialist nut case...
Socialism. It's probably one of the most confusing and misunderstood terms in the US. Partly this is because it is a political movement separate from it being an economic method. Party this is because there was a huge propaganda campaign in the US to spread fear about it as part of a campaign against Asia in the cold war.
Listen to me carefully. Every president ever has been a socialist. Every economist is a socialist to a fair degree or they are insane. Socialism has always been part of our economic system and trying to eliminate it entirely would destroy the economy. Every stable economy in the world is a balance of socialism and capitalism (and communism, but there's no need to get into that right now).
The highway department, post office, military, police, fire department, public schools, NASA, and the FDA are all socialist programs. Socialist programs were established as part of our government from day one. Obama is working to increase the level of socialism in the US. That makes him moderately informed about economics and is pretty much what every reputable economist says is required to reduce the volatility of our stock market and return wealth disparity to sane levels. He's advocating policies that have worked in numerous other countries. Sure it is socialism, but you have to understand socialism is nothing new and not some bogey monster. If we're going to get our economy back on track, socialism coupled with more progressive taxation on the high end is pretty close to the only viable route. You can't lower taxes for people who aren't paying any now. They can't gain wealth starting from their current state. (Try playing monopoly where you start out with $5 and the other guy starts with $50000, but is willing to loan you enough to get started, provided he gets 2/3 of any profit you make. Sure, you could win, but it isn't likely and if you play every day, you will lose overall.)
So, do you have a sane counter proposal or are you just a extreme capitalist nut case with no real understanding of the problem?
Yes. Relieving the middle class of their cash through inflation and interest, and placing that cash in the pockets of rich bankers does have benefits. For the bankers.
For the rest of us, the national debt spirals out of control, personal debt spirals out of control, the dollar drops in value each year (all of these in a compound growth curve), while our wages increase in a linear, far slower fashion. We have less and less resources to deal with more and more debt needed to make up for our shortfall in income relative to the value of our money.
I'm not a Republican or a Neocon by any stretch, but Keynesian economics of "inflation" (or devaluation, as I prefer to call it) are not beneficial to the common middle class slob. They're only beneficial to the upper crust.
No, actually cutting taxes is what makes the rich, richer, while the middle-class and poor (who pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes) get poorer.
Meanwhile, spending money on shared public projects (roads, schools, etc.) benefits us all equally, and the rich pay a higher proportion of the costs.
All the problems we're facing, which you've listed, were NOT caused by Keynesian economics. They were caused by neocon pseduo-economics (you'll note that Republicans never have actual, accredited economists in their staff). They were caused in no small part by Clinton and Bush's tax cuts on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and dumping money into the stock market, rather than actual public projects.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How is it MS needs to lay-off employees but can throw 36.5 million on this?
The state should not give tax payer money to a monopolistic company damaging the local economy by laying off people when clearly they didn't financially need to.
That's a lot of jobs. When you realize that some cities would fork over hundreds of millions in annual tax abatements just to get that many jobs, pitching in on a bridge is not a bad deal.
This is my sig.
Okay, twitter:
1) Microsoft still pays huge amounts of taxes to the locale so it is certainly not a burden. You can bicker about whether it's as much a boon as it should be but there's no question it's a boon to the city.
2) Why don't more MS employees live in Redmond? Are you serious? Where do you live where everybody works within 3 miles of where they live.
3) This "bridge" is not on private property. It's on public property. It's not only to serve Microsoft. It connects two points in Redmond that happen both to have Microsoft offices. It also benefits, for example, Nintendo and Boeing. And everybody in Redmond.
4) The 40000 people of Redmond should fund the basic public infrastructure of their city because that's the role of the government of Redmond.
Then the Ireland thing comes completely out of nowhere.
If you lived in Redmond, WA, you'd know why the article's author is full of shit. Try commuting from main campus, and with a company that has had significant expansion over the last few years, commutes are painful, streets are crowded, and traffic is always challenged either with going to or coming from work. There are traffic studies done ALL THE TIME in Redmond, and if you only felt the pain of the congestion in this small town, you'd know that MS didn't have to offer to pay for anything for this bridge, but they are.
However, a revised estimate of the cost was somewhat higher than expected. The City of Redmond (not MS) decided to ask for stimulus money to offset this. After some initial talks, Redmond chose not to ask Microsoft for additional funding until they had pursued federal funds, which were assigned. (Redmond did not make up the difference itself because it cannot afford it.)
This is not a case of MS pushing Congress into funding their campus development. This is a case of Redmond deciding the project costs were a good investment for the city, and asking for stimulus money to make up a shortfall.
Note also that MS is expanding its campus in a huge project. The overpass is a small, small portion of what the company will ultimately spend. This is good for Redmond's economy, and the city wants to encourage the expansion.
A lot of the time, 'bonuses' are simply a way for a company to take part of what they pay people (and, of course, only those who make 6 figures can afford to accept this) and delay paying it for 6-12 months at a time.
Some of it may be performance based - meaning they can tweak *part* of that bonus based on performance - but the bulk is really just what their salary should be.
All so the company can squeeze 6 months of interest out of part of what they pay some people. Seems more trouble than it's worth, but it's more common than you would think. There may be other benefits to the company too - reducing unemployment insurance and medicare deductions, etc. Not certain about that. And they can get more 'creative' with salary adjustments.