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Cities Are Competing to Give Amazon the 'Mother of All Civic Giveaways' (vice.com)
Louise Matsakis, reporting for Motherboard: Amazon announced earlier this month that it was looking to build a second headquarters outside Seattle, where more than 40,000 of the company's more than 380,000 employees currently work. The tech giant is searching for a locale with at least a million people, a diverse population, and excellent schools, among other qualifications. It gave municipalities six weeks -- until October 19 -- to submit a proposal to be chosen. Local governments in more than 100 American and Canadian cities, including places like San Diego, Chicago, Dallas, and Detroit, quickly scrambled to outline why they should be home to Amazon's new corporate office, which is expected to employ up to 50,000 workers. The mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser, even made a scripted video for Amazon explaining why the capital should be picked. It featured an Echo, Amazon's smart speaker. But experts who have studied Amazon's business practices say having one of the most tax-allergic corporations in the world come to your hometown might not actually be a good thing.
I'd like the opposite direction - remove corporate taxes altogether and instead tax capital gains (and the special dividend) at normal income tax rates. Adjust rates and loopholes to fill any revenue holes. Sure, thousands of accountants and tax lawyers would suddenly be looking for work - but it would destroy this kind of thing. And it would make the US into a very attractive site for any multinational.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Given that Jeff Bezos owns the biggest house in Washington, as well as the biggest newspaper in DC, clearly the CEO of Amazon wants to be in Washington, DC. And his personal preference may well be the most important opinion in the relocation committee.
That means great colleges. It will likely need to be on, or close to, the east coast. It will have to be corporate tax friendly. It will need to be easily accessible domestically and internationally - great airports. They won't want to fish in the same pond as Google, Microsoft etc. for talent - drives up their labor costs. It will need great communications infrastructure (networking, roads, power ...).
Clearly Stalin and Mao are not what Marx intended, but they were the inevitable result of his ideology. His belief that the dictatorship of the proletariat would remain uncorrupted and "fade away" was completely absurd. Human nature doesn't work that way.
You could make the same argument about democracy, its only worked in a handful of countries.
I think there is a fair argument that dictators didn't come out of Marx.