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Amazon Picks 20 Finalists For 'HQ2' Second Headquarters Location (nbcnews.com)
bigpat writes: Amazon took in hundreds of proposals and narrowed it down to twenty places for its "second" headquarters, with up to 50,000 new jobs promised in the next 15 years and millions of square feet of office and research space. The cities include: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Montgomery County, Maryland, Nashville, Newark, NJ, New York City, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Toronto and Washington D.C. Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate the feasibility of a future partnership that can accommodate our hiring plans as well as benefit our employees and the local community." The company said it would make its decision later in 2018.
It brings in jobs, and the workers pay taxes. At least that's the theory.
Except that it never actually happens that way. The taxes paid by those new workers don't come anywhere close to the tax revenue that the city loses. Never has, never will.
I find it quite sad that cities won't tell Amazon to fuck off and instead are falling all over themselves to give away billions of dollars to a huge wealthy company that already has plenty of money and could easily build a new headquarters without a penny in "tax breaks".
I don't understand why anyone would want their city to win this. Your taxes will go up to bring in Amazon, and that gets you... what?
Because... they're going to spend billions of dollars wherever they settle, and there will be thousands of jobs. And those people will be buying lunch, hiring plumbers, paying oceans of income and property taxes, and otherwise bumping up the regional economy in a huge way. To say nothing of the local contractors, vendors and other service providers who will along for the ride. I can't think of too many cities that wouldn't want that boost in their local economies and the ability it brings to attract a thousand other businesses into the same orbit.
The way the EU has structured things, with incentives for relocation being illegal, seems far superior.
And it's exactly that sort of control over your town's choices and economic life that makes many people absolutely recoil at the notion of EU-style nanny statism.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I wonder why? You red-state folks seem to [sic] warm and welcoming...
In my experience, the people you meet in most red states are wildly more affable, warm, friendly, and polite than most you'll meet in the increasingly effete, shrill, divisive, identity-politics-obsessed wastelands of political-correctness-paralyzed lands of blue. Your comments is a sure sign that you never get out of your holier-than-thou bubble and echo chamber. Give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised that the people you hate are actually a lot nicer than the people you feel you're supposed to like because they vote the way you do.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No doubt the set of white people willing to live and work in an urban environment where there are brown people is self-selected to skew blue. But having a much higher concentration of non-white voters who skew blue doesn't hurt either. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this map, but, if accurate, then the only city in Texas where the whites voted Blue was Austin. Dallas and Houston, then, which went to Clinton, must have done so because of the brown vote.